The American Name Society is pleased to announce the 2020 Slate of Nominees for open ANS Officer positions. During the ANS annual meeting in New Orleans, LA in January 2020, the Slate of Nominees will be formally presented to the ANS membership for the election process.
Allied Conference Coordinator (2020-2022): Dr. Luisa Caiazzo (University of Basilicata, ITALY)
Dr. Caiazzo holds a PhD in English for Special Purposes (University of Naples “Federico II”). She is an Associate Professor of English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Basilicata. Her areas of interest include Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Translation Studies and Onomastics. She has not only given presentations at several international conferences on onomastics: University of Calabria (2014) and University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ (2015), in Italy; American Name Society Annual Conferences (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019); ICOS Conference (2017) in Hungary; ICONN 4 Conference (2017) in Romania. She has also organized two international conferences on naming practices: 1) “(Re)naming places, (Re)shaping Identities” at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ (2015); 2) “Naming, Identity and Tourism” at the University of Basilicata (2018). I also proposed a panel on “Names and Tourism” at the 2019 ANS conference in New York City. Recently, she edited the multi-authored volume (Re)naming Places, (Re)shaping Identities (with Oriana Palusci), the volume Naming, Identity and Tourism (with Richard Coates and Maoz Azaryahu) and reviewed the book titled Insular Toponymies by Joshua Nash for the journal NAMES. Beside serving as a reviewer for the ANS annual conferences and the ANS Emerging Scholar Award, she has also served as a blind reviewer for articles submitted to the following journals: NAMES, AION, Applied Linguistics and Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines. Luisa has served as the ANS Secretary since 2016 and has recently joined the Editorial Board of NAMES.
Secretary (2020-2022): Dr. Star Medzerian Vanguri (Nova Southeastern University)
Dr. Vanguri is associate professor and associate chair of the Department of Writing and Communication at Nova Southeastern University, where she has been since 2010. She also serves as the director of the composition program. She received a B.A. in English from Florida State University and an M.A. in English Education from the University of Central Florida. Her Ph.D. is in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English, from the University of Arizona. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and stylistics. Recent publications include two edited collections: The Centrality of Style (Parlor Press/WAC Clearinghouse) and Rhetorics of Names and Naming (Routledge). Star’s work has also appeared in the scholarly journals Rhetoric Review and the Journal of Writing Research.
Membership Officer (2020-2022): Dr. Sharon N. Obasi (University of Nebraska Kearney, USA)
Dr. Obasi is a Behavioral Neuroscientist developing scholarship in the area of self-identity, social identity and the influence of identity on the articulation of policy and the implementation of programs for vulnerable populations in rural locales. Her research on namesaking is central to her scholarship, teaching, and service. She has been a regular presenter at the ANS annual conference and has served as an abstract reviewer for the event. She currently serves as an ANS Member-at-Large, the ANS Facebook SIG Coordinator for Place Names, and is a member of the NAMES Editorial Board. Her stated aspiration is to continue to serve the ANS by encouraging membership within the organization and contributing to thought-provoking discussions on onomastics.
Member-at-large (2020-2022): Dr. Andreas Gavrielatos (University of Reading, ENGLAND)
Dr. Gavrielatos completed his BA in Classical Philology and an MA in Latin Philology at the University of Athens. He received his PhD at the University of Leeds in 2013 with a thesis entitled ‘Personal names on Gallo-Roman terra sigillata (1st – 3rd c. AD).’ His PhD studies were funded by the AHRC. Both Andreas’s doctoral work and subsequent research projects focus on the onomastic changes that occur in communities and/or individual choices that reflect the effects of multiculturalism and/or multilingualism. He has taught at the Universities of Leeds and Edinburgh and at the Open University of Cyprus. Currently, he is at the University of Reading and was recently elected as a Research Associate at the Institute of Advanced Studies (London). A specialist in anthroponymy and classical philology, he helped to develop a major project focused on the development of theoretical framework for the analysis of personal names in ancient multilingual communities of the Roman Empire. Andreas also recently completed an edited volume entitled “Self Presentation and Identity in the Roman World”. Although his research is based in Ancient Onomastics, his ultimate aim is to identify connections to modern attitudes towards personal names and their function in shaping individual identities in a radically changing world. Andreas has served as the ANS Allied Conference Coordinator since 2016. During this time, he has organized four panels for the annual MLA convention (2017-2020).