At its October meeting, the MLA Executive Council appointed Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, to serve as the next editor of PMLA. Her term begins in July 2016 and runs for three years. She will succeed Simon Gikandi, who has been editor since July 2011.
Dimock has written on a wide range of topics in American literature and popular culture, publishing film criticism in the Los Angeles Review of Books and essays in Critical Inquiry, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. Her books include Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism; Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy; Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time; and the collaborative volume Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. She received her PhD from Yale University and her BA from Harvard University.