Savannah Geidel is a Writing Lecturer at North Carolina State University’s Agricultural Institute. Dedicated to promoting environmental literacy, her work focuses on writing’s ability to foster meaningful connections between human and non-human beings. Similarly, her research scrutinizes how environmental crises are communicated and explores how literature can raise awareness of environmental racism, specifically in the US South. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Secondary English Education from SUNY New Paltz and a master’s degree in English from UNC Wilmington. As president of the ESO, Savannah works to create more conference opportunities for emerging scholars in the field of Southern Studies.

Daria (Dasha) Goncharova is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Kentucky, with a background in Linguistics and Cultural Studies. Her area of expertise is 20th-century and 21st-century American literature and film with an emphasis on the intersection of space, citizenship, and whiteness, a focus largely informed by her own experience as an international scholar residing in the USA. She has published in Adaptation and the edited collection Post45
Vs. The World and has publications forthcoming in New Review of Film & Television Studies (NRFTS) and Literature/Film Quarterly. As the Vice President of ESO, she manages the organization’s Twitter/X and assists with creating opportunities for professionalization.

Anthony Gottlich is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Mississippi, where he is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Gender Studies. His area of expertise is 20th-century and 21st-century multiethnic American literature. His dissertation explores entanglement as a comparative reading practice. He investigates contemporary multiethnic novels that return to the plantation as a way of understanding the current ecological crisis. He has published in Modern
Fiction Studies, Global South, and ASAP/J and has an article forthcoming in The Living Legacy of African American Studies: Its Past, Present, and Future(s) with UGA Press. As the Secretary of ESO, he plans meetings, records executive meeting minutes, and compiles the bi-monthly ESO newsletter.

Tori Bush is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colorado College. Rooted in environmental humanities, postcolonial/decolonial theory, and critical ethnic studies, her work focuses on the Gulf of Mexico, exploring how neocolonial structures shape and resist representations within coastal multiethnic communities. Her current work in progress is called Eco-Orientalism: Transnational Literatures of the Gulf of Mexico. She co-edited The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing (UPF, 2021) and has published in journals such as ISLE, Southern Quarterly, Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture and others. She received her PhD from Louisiana State University in 2023.

Shari Arnold is a Literary Studies PhD student at Georgia State University and serves as the Past-President Advisor of the Emerging Scholars Organization. Her primary research examines how pop culture informs and complicates the intersections between race, class, and gender in the U.S. South, with a specific emphasis on stereotypes of African American women in literature, television, and film.

If you would like to contact the ESO executive council, please send an email to [email protected]. You can also find us on Facebook.

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