The Philip Roth Society

Officers of the Philip Roth Society

 

President
Matthew Shipe
Washington University in St. Louis
St. Louis, MO

mashipe@wustl.edu

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Matthew Shipe is a lecturer and the Director of Advanced Writing at Washington University in St. Louis where he teaches courses in contemporary American fiction. He has published essays on John Updike, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, and Barry Hannah. In 2015, he won The John Updike Review's Emerging Writers Prize for his essay "The Long Goodbye: The Role of Memory in John Updike's Short Fiction." Alongside Scott Dill, he is editing Updike and Politics: Due Considerations, which is forthcoming from Lexington Press. He currently serves as President of the Philip Roth Society and is on the Executive Board of the John Updike Society.  

 

Secretary

Mike Witcombe

Bath Spa University

Bath, England

witcombeuk@gmail.com

 

Mike Witcombe is a lecturer at Bath Spa University, where he researches and teaches contemporary Jewish fiction. He is particularly interested in the intersection of Jewish and gender identities. He is the co-editor of the New Voices in Jewish-American Literature essay collection, and the author of the monograph Jewish-American Literature: Essential Criticism, forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan.

 

Program Director
Miriam Jaffe
Rutgers University

New Brusnwick, NJ

jaffe.miri@gmail.com

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Miriam (Miri) Jaffe, PhD (English), MSW, (she/her) has been involved with the Philip Roth Society since 2006. Her research on Roth, which addresses race, gender, illness, and autobiographical gestures, appears in Philip Roth Studies (2008; 2009; 2012), Roth and Celebrity (2012), EBSCO Critical Insights Series (2013), Comparative Literature and Culture (2014), Open Library of Humanities (2017), and Philip Roth in Context (2021). Miri is currently an Associate Teaching Professor at Rutgers University, where she has worked in the writing program for over twenty years, serving as a Writing Center Director, Assistant Director, and, currently, faculty member in the Graduate Writing Program, where she specializes in social science writing. She has edited five casebooks on clinical psychotherapy (Routledge, 2017; 2019; 2020; 2020; 2022) and serves as associate editor of the international, peer-reviewed journal Writing and Pedagogy (Equinox). Possibly of importance to this post, Miri is a New Jersey native and resident who lives a half-hour outside of Newark. Currently, Miri is working on a piece about “Roth’s Legacy and Cancel Culture,” a resurrective retrospective of sorts, which uses passages from The Human Stain, Exit Ghost, and Indignation to imagine Roth speaking from beyond the grave in self-defense over the reception of his authorized biography.

 

Membership Chair

Mark Fisher

UC Irvine

Irvine, California

mfisher@hs.uci.edu

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Mark Fisher is long-time Philip Roth enthusiast, and excited by the prospect of working with the Board. He is a Professor of Neurology at UC Irvine, where he conducts stroke research and is active as a stroke neurology clinician.  He is also involved in multi-disciplinary research, and has been particularly interested in how Roth depicted neurological illness in his novels.

 

Newsletter Editor
Andy Connolly
Hostos Community College, CUNY

Bronx, NY

andy78andy@gmail.com

 

Treasurer

Brittany Hirth

Dickinson State University

Dickinson, North Dakota

brittany.hirth@dickinsonstate.edu

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Brittany Hirth joined the English faculty at Dickinson State University in 2018. She specializes in American literature, and her research interests include trauma studies, war representation, and Jewish American and Holocaust literature. She primarily researches the aesthetics of absurdity and the role of black humor in war literature. She has published on the fiction of Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, and the television series, The Walking Dead in addition to a personal interview with Vietnam War writer, Tim O’Brien.

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Philip Roth Studies Executive Editors

Aimee Pozorski

Central Connecticut State University

New Britain, Connecticut

 

Maren Scheurer

Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Frankfurt, Germany