The members of the William Morris Society in the United States elected four new board representatives at the Society’s annual meeting in March 2025. These board members will serve a three-year term, ending in 2028.
The new board members are:
Caroline Giddis Macia
Caroline is a curatorial research associate at the High Museum of Art, supporting projects with a range of expertise from the long nineteenth century to contemporary art. She has published on Mary Seton Watts and Phoebe Anna Traquair, and is currently researching intersections of the Arts and Crafts Movement and fiber arts in Joseon-dynasty Korea. As the 2020 Alfred Appel, Jr. Curatorial Fellow at the Delaware Art Museum, Caroline curated the exhibition Collecting and Connecting: Recent Acquisitions, 2010–2020 (2021) and was the research assistant for the international touring exhibition Evelyn and William De Morgan: A Marriage of Arts and Crafts (2022). Caroline received an MA in art history from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2020 and has held positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the SCAD Museum of Art. She co-founded and edited Tesserae Press, an online arts publication for emerging scholars, and is an alumna of the 2019 Victorian Society in America London Summer School.
Ana Samanamud
Ana is a bilingual assistant case manager at C&T Home care agency, located in New York City (Teleworking), where she is responsible for tracking enrollment processes and approved cases with insurance companies. Ana is Peruvian and lives in Barcelona and she is passionate about literature and painting. Her first approach to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was Dante Gabriel Rossetti whose designs stand as a link between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement. In 2020, she created a private group on Facebook and named it “William Morris.” A wide variety of topics are explored: block-printed fabric and wallpaper design, literature, interior design, handcraft, stained glass windows, the Red House, the Morris family and their close circle, etc. All the information is collected from books and from verified sources; members are allowed to share posts and pictures (they are keen on wallpapers and fabrics). The number of members has been growing since then, and now, there are more than 16,000 members.
Jesse Cordes Selbin
Jesse holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is assistant professor of English at Gettysburg College, where she teaches long-nineteenth-century British and global Anglophone literature. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of close reading and the rise of “critical thinking” as a popular ideal. Her research has appeared in PMLA, ELH (English Literary History), Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, The Victorian Periodicals Review, and Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (among other forums). Her work examines important aesthetic and sociopolitical influences on William Morris, as well as the laborers whose lives and educations were one of Morris’s central concerns.
Heather Bozant Witcher
Heather is Assistant Professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, Alabama. She is the author of Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation (2022) and co-editor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). Her upcoming research focuses on the Pre-Raphaelite archive and Chelsea.