Claire Seiler - Midcentury Suspension

As readers of Midcentury Suspension will discover, I love a good catalog. So it is a double delight to begin by acknowledging the support this book and I have received from many people and institutions.

A glimmer of Midcentury Suspension began to emerge at the very end of my doctoral work at Stanford University. Roland Greene saw and supported that glimmer, just as he had encouraged my fullest thinking throughout my graduate training. His model intellectual mentorship and warm friendship are anchors in my life. Nick Jenkins paid careful attention to my ideas and prose; he also freely shared his stunning poetic insight and some archival treasuresincluding the Gotham Book Mart photographthat cracked open my thinking. Also at Stanford, I benefited from Terry Castles energy and candor; the wisdom and kindness of my late friend George Dekker; and from the collaborative spirit of the Stanford Humanities Center Poetics Workshop. During and since our charmed interval in San Francisco, Ive marveled at the luck of making such brilliant friends there as Allison Carruth, Harris Feinsod, Heather Houser, Michael Hoyer, Hanna Janiszewska, Ruth Kaplan, Ju Yon Kim, and Lee Konstantinou. I thank in particular Allison, who has read and reread this project and who believed in its value when I could not.

Dickinson College has afforded intellectual inspiration and institutional support. For the former, I thank especially my departmental colleagues Carol Ann Johnston, Wendy Moffat, Siobhan Phillips, and Greg Steirer, who got my vision for this book and supported the time it took me to try to realize it; and Sarah Kersh and Sheela Jane Menon, who cheered me on in the later stages. Amy Farrell and Sharon OBrien shared their friendship and steadying mentorship. My completion of the project was enabled by the professional savvy of Kelly Winters-Fazio and Denise McCauley, the coordinators of the academic departments I chaired while on the home stretch. I am grateful for support from Dickinsons Faculty Personnel Committee, which granted me an essential pretenure sabbatical, and from the Colleges Research and Development Committee, which funded necessary travel and the invaluable research assistantships of Julia Barone, Lisa Borsellino, Noah Fusco, and Emma Rodwin. Working with these four terrific studentsand with so many othersmade this book and my broader work infinitely more rewarding than it otherwise would have been. And more fun.

Teaching at a liberal arts college deepens my awareness of the debt I owe to the extraordinary faculty with whom I studied at Middlebury College. I happily acknowledge Stephen Donadio, John Hunisak, John McWilliams, William Nash (who gave me a much-needed nudge), Katy Smith Abbott, and two truly life-saving professors: Murray Dry, in whose legendary course on the American political regime I first read