Keynote Speakers

Dr. Mike Collins is a Reader in American Studies at King's College London, Chair of the British Association for American Studies, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of two monographs, The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800 - 1865 (Michigan, 2016) and Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Realism and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (EUP, 2023) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (with Gavin Jones) (CUP, 2023). He has published numerous articles in a range of journals, including Textual Practice, Journal of American Studies, Comparative American Studies, and English Language Notes. More recently, he has work forthcoming related to intelligence testing, Lydia Davis, The Panama Canal, and the American Civil Service in literature and culture.

Dr. Ross K. Tangedal is Associate Professor of English and Director & Publisher of Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. He is the author of The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and editor of Good Country: Ernest Hemingway and the American West (University of Nevada Press, forthcoming 2028), The Routledge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald (Routledge, forthcoming 2027), Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell (Michigan State University Press, 2023), and Editing the Harlem Renaissance (Clemson University Press, 2021). He has published articles in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Studies in the American Short Story, South Atlantic Review, The Hemingway Review, Authorship, and The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, as well as chapters in The Handbook of the American Short Story and other volumes. He is the associate volume editor of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway volumes 6 & 7 (Cambridge University Press, 2024, 2026) and future volumes, a trustee of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation & Society, and Vice-President of the Sherwood Anderson Society. He was appointed president of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story in January 2026.