Cecily Swanson is a doctoral candidate in the department of English at Cornell University. Her teaching and research interests include 20th century American literature, race and gender studies, autobiographical writing, and social network theory. Her dissertation, “A Circle is a Necessity: American Women Modernists and the Aesthetics of Sociability,” considers the legacy of salon conversation for writers who conceived of literature as not just a text, but also a way of talking. She is interested in how alternative forms of writing—archival notes, journals, letters, and literary parlor games—produce a sense of authorship. In collaboration with an NYU graduate student, she is working on a digital forum, Archive Notebook , for exchanging and sustaining original source research in the humanities. She is Cornell’s Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) dissertation fellow in 2012-2013.
