The Center for Mark Twain Studies is honored to announce the 2025 Class of Quarry Farm Fellows!
Talia Argondezzi

Talia Argondezzi is a satirist and humor writer whose work has been featured in McSweeney’s, The New Yorker Daily Shouts, and several other humor publications, both print and online. She specializes in academic and literary humor, and, in 2023, became the first writer to have three comedy pieces on McSweeney’s year-end most-read list. Inspired by Twain’s tongue-in-cheek advice essays, she wrote a satirical self-help book called Lean the F*ck Out (2023), which light-heartedly pushes back against girl-boss hustle culture. She directs the writing and speaking program at Ursinus College, where she teaches humor writing, American literature, and writing pedagogy.
At Quarry Farm, I will complete my forthcoming humor book, Bedtime Stories for Academics: Funny Fairy Tales to Help Faculty, Staff, and Grad Students Survive the Semester. The collection imagines familiar stories from literature, Mother Goose, mythology, and folklore, transforming them into irreverent satire of the issues that keep higher education workers up at night. The collection will include a chapter inspired by Twain’s most canonical novel and tentatively titled “Professor Huck Finn Fakes His Own Death to Avoid Attending One More Faculty Meeting”; other planned chapters include “Hester Prynne Demands Her Scarlet ‘A’ Be Changed to an ‘A+,’” “Professor Rip Van Winkle Awakens to Discover He’s Been Canceled,” and “Captain Ahab Writes Letters of Recommendation to the Crew of the Pequod.” With any additional time, I will start my next humor book: AITA, Socrates? Dead Writers Solve Modern Problems asks what would happen if the greatest writers and thinkers of all time were called upon to weigh in on the inane arguments and dilemmas of today. I will use a few of Twain’s lesser-known satirical advice essays and pamphlets to let Twain give his opinion on contemporary challenges. I’m so excited to use comedy to bring these classics of American literature to a broader, non-specialist audience.
Jocelyn Chadwick

Jocelyn A. Chadwick is a life-long English teacher and international scholar. Formerly, a full-time professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, she now lectures occasionally and conducts seminars there. In addition to teaching and writing, Chadwick also works online and in classrooms with 4-12 students and teachers around the country, focusing on literature, writing, and curriculum development. She has published numerous articles and books including, The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Common Core: A Paradigmatic Shift; and Teaching Literature in the Context of Literacy Instruction, She was invited to the White House as panel member for the series, Celebrating America’s Authors. Current projects include PBS American Masters, PBS The Great American Read, a new book series for the Folger Shakespeare Library, recurring blogs for Larry Ferlazzo in Education Week, consultant for Center for Mark Twain Studies, and Pearson/Savvas, Expert Advice Contributor for NBC TODAY Parenting Team, and a book in progress, How to Teach Twain in the 21st Century: Fomenting the Next Generation of Readers, Teachers, and Scholars.
Quarry Farm and the Center for Mark Twain Studies are important components of this project because the farm itself and the Center’s holdings of Mark Twain are components that the majority of teachers and pre-service teachers—both English and Social Studies—have little to no concrete information on. And, if the teachers are unaware or are too afraid, our students around the country may never, ever, experience this man, his time, his phenomenal body of work. Especially important to me is the dearth of substantive knowledge teachers and students of color have not only of the man and his work, but also, and equally as important, the historical time period in which Mark Twain not only wrote but also his impact around the world—an impact that only his speeches, interviews, notes/journals, and letters reveal so clearly.
Using my time at the Farm will allow me not only to make use of the primary documents but also to make use of photographing the outside of the farm and grounds—again for the myriad of teachers, students, and librarians who will never, ever make the pilgrimage to this, to me, sacred site. In and of itself, the new book is unique and different in content, approach, and depth. Having the real presence of Quarry Farm and the Center for Mark Twain Studies as critical and prescient resources, readers can see and experience through the lens of a teacher, one like them: one with whom many of them are aware and with whom they already feel a connection. My ultimate aim is to foment a new, and hopefully, a more willing audience for not only the teaching of Mark Twain pieces, but more importantly, the keeping of this writer, husband, father, and thinker in classrooms around this country forever.
In and of itself, the new book is unique and different in content, approach, and depth. Having the real presence of Quarry Farm and the Center for Mark Twain Studies as critical and prescient resources, readers can see and experience through the lens of a teacher, one like them: one with whom many of them are aware and with whom they already feel a connection. My ultimate aim is to foment a new, and hopefully, a more willing audience for not only the teaching of Mark Twain pieces, but more importantly, the keeping of this writer, husband, father, and thinker in classrooms around this country forever.
Michael Czarnecki

Michael Czarnecki is a poet, photographer, oral memoirist and small press publisher. In 1995 Michael gave up other work to devote his time and life to creativity. Since then he has made his living solely through creative work. In the last 30 years he has given hundreds of featured readings throughout the country. His Poems Across America Tour in 2013, a 14-week journey, featured a reading in each of the 48 contiguous states. Michael has had 18 chapbooks and books published, including The Rockwell Museum: Poetry Inspired by the Collection, a collection of ekphrastic poems with accompanying paintings. As a photographer he has produced three traveling photo shows and 15 of his photos have been used on covers of books.
What I plan as my project is to create a body of work, both in words and photographs, documenting two weeks at Quarry Farm, both inside the house and throughout the grounds. Here, where I live on Wheeler Hill (outside of Corning, NY), I have documented the 50 acres with photographs of flowers, birds, trees, mushrooms, etc. and also the distant views afforded by this hilltop location. I envision doing the same for the residency at Quarry Farm, documenting in words and photos the quietness, beauty and spirit of the place.
I have read of Mark Twain mentioning willows and oaks and summertime lightning in his writing about Quarry Farm. I would like to research to find more of what he may have written specifically about the place. Did he mention flowers and birds? Other trees besides willow and oak? Weather conditions other than thunder-storms? I know much has changed at Quarry Farm in the time since Mark Twain was last there. Yet, I’m sure there are some consistencies that have also remained. I’d like to explore those consistencies and changes with photos and words.
Kerry Driscoll

Kerry Driscoll, Professor of English Emerita at the University of Saint Joseph (West Hartford, CT) is currently Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the University of California, Berkeley. A long-time Twain scholar, she is the author of Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples (University of California Press, 2018), the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and Australasia, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. She is past president of the Mark Twain Circle of America as well as a contributing editor to its journal, the Mark Twain Annual. She served on the Mark Twain House and Museum’s Board of Trustees from 2017-23, and is currently a member of their honorary Advisory Council. In 2022, she received the Louis J. Budd award for distinguished scholarship from the Mark Twain Circle of America in recognition of her groundbreaking research.
Although Mark Twain published over twenty books during his lifetime—in addition to countless short stories, sketches, and essays—he nonetheless maintained (to friends and interviewers alike) that he was essentially a “lazy” man. Speaking to a New York Times reporter on the cusp of his 70th birthday in 1905, he insisted that he “had not done a day’s work in all [his] life,” explaining, “What I have done…was play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it.” My research project explores the concepts of “work” and “play” in relation to the writer’s creative process and prolific literary output. More specifically, it focuses on the physical conditions and circumstances Mark Twain found most conducive to the expression of his genius—from his Quarry Farm study to a rented room atop a mountain in Heidelberg, Germany, as well as vacation properties in Onteora, New York and Dublin, New Hampshire—using the analytic lens of Attention Restoration Theory, developed by environmental psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan in their groundbreaking study, The Experience of Nature.
Christopher Gilbert

Chris Gilbert is Associate Professor of English in Communication & Media at Assumption University. He is author of When Comedy Goes Wrong (2025) and Caricature and National Character: The United States at War (2021) as well as numerous journal articles in various academic journals and book chapters in a number of edited volumes. He is also co-editor with John Louis Lucaites of the collection Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture (2024). When he is not writing or teaching, he is usually somewhere on his family’s farmstead, riding a bike, playing the guitar, reading, drawing, or spending time with his wife and two kiddos.
Conventional, and indeed ancient, wisdom has it that humans are unique in the animal kingdom because we are the only sentient beings who laugh. Yet contemporary research in neuroscience has demonstrated that rats are ticklish. What is more, they seem to possess a “laugh center” in their brains. Research in bioacoustics has also revealed that nonhuman animals laugh, and not just our evolutionary relatives, i.e., chimpanzees and gorillas. Dogs laugh. Dolphins laugh. Birds in general have—it might be said—a sense of humor. So what? My recent scholarship, and the work that I will continue to pursue at Quarry Farm, grapples with this question. More specifically, I will delve into what it might suggest that laughter is not unique to human animals and, relatedly, what nonhuman animal laughter might suggest about the significance of our own ostensibly exceptional capacity to laugh, to be humorous, and to embody a comic spirit. Mark Twain is essential to this line of inquiry not only because he was a notable advocate for animal welfare but also because of how much nonhuman animals feature in his writing. Furthermore, the time in which he wrote was a time when people were adopting a broad sense of what Harriet Ritvo calls “rhetorical animals” and, following Susan Pearson, looking at oppression and sufferance as evidence of misplaced ideations about our own exceptionalism. Among Twain’s works to which I will pay particular attention are essays and stories like “A Dog’s Tale,” “Birds with a Sense of Humor,” “Man’s Place in the Animal World,” “Letters from a Dog to Another Dog Explaining and Accounting for Man,” “The Laughing Jackass of Adelaide,” “The Idiotic Ant,” “The Dogs of Constantinople,” and “The Phosphorescent Sea-Serpent,” as well as “A Horse’s Tale,” “The Jumping Frog,” “A Fable,” and—of course—“The Lowest Animal.” I will also work through portions of The Mysterious Stranger and Letters From the Earth with a specific focus on expressions of laughter that capture the tension between the human and the nonhuman (i.e., spiritual, or supernatural). Put simply, the point will be to really dwell on Twain’s notion that a sense of humor is part and parcel of human nature as well as the natural “comic” way for many, many animals whose lived experiences can reveal a great deal about who we are, and who they are, too. I will consider Twain’s concept of laughter as a primal thing, a natural thing, and thus a transnational thing for so many creatures of the world, and thereby rethink that old idiom of imagining not “if animals could speak” but rather “if animals could laugh.”
Ray Horton

Ray Horton is Associate Professor of English at Murray State University. He is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled “American Fiction’s Secular Faith,” which examines how novelists from the late nineteenth century to the present refigure the secularization thesis by crafting their aesthetics of quotidian experiences and ephemeral images out of their sustained engagement with religious beliefs and practices. A portion of this project, on the work of Marilynne Robinson, is published in PMLA. His writing also appears in Christianity & Literature, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Post45, and Early American Literature. In 2023, he was named “College Teacher of the Year” by the Kentucky Council of Teachers of English, and he is a past president of the American Religion and Literature Society.
During my residency at Quarry Farm, I will work on a chapter of my book project, “American Fiction’s Secular Faith.” This chapter, titled “Supernatural Naturalism,” focuses extensively religion and secularism in Twain’s later work, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to his Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. Specifically, my plan during this residency will be to build upon a presentation I gave in May 2024 on Connecticut Yankee and What Is Man? at a panel hosted by the Mark Twain Circle at the American Literature Association conference, expanding this presentation into the first section of my book’s first body chapter. Throughout this chapter, I draw upon scholarship from an interdisciplinary conversation among humanities and social sciences disciplines that has come to be known in various circles as “secularization theory” or “postsecular criticism” in order to demonstrate how several American writers—most notably Twain, Kate Chopin, and Richard Wright—incorporate the religious and the supernatural into their fiction even as, paradoxically, the philosophical outlook of their work more fully resembles the disenchanted secularity one generally associates with naturalist realism. Throughout much of Twain’s later work, the deterministic outlook we often associate with naturalism follows on the heels of the theological, spiritual, or otherwise supernatural devices that are central to the texts in question, a persistent preoccupation with the religious that undercuts its otherwise increasingly resolute vision of a disenchanted modernity.
Thomas Howard

Thomas W. Howard is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bilkent University (Ankara, Türkiye). His research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature and science as well as the environmental humanities. His current book project, Aphoristic Science: Ecology, Psychology, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, centers an open-ended aphoristic style in the emergence of transatlantic scientific methods, especially among the American Transcendentalists and Pragmatists. His research has been previously supported by The Huntington Library and a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Germany. His work appears in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.
During my time at Quarry Farm, I will conduct research for an article on Twain’s Mysterious Stranger manuscripts as an alternative form of psychological investigation. Twain’s interest in emerging psychological research is well documented, including his writings on “mental telegraphy,” his membership in the Society for Psychical Research, and his friendship with the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James. My argument is that as the field of psychology became increasingly professionalized in the late nineteenth century, Twain (and others) turned to speculative fiction to investigate phenomena deemed “unscientific.” While I have already written on Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins as such a speculative example—where the characters and the conjoined stories themselves reflect nineteenth-century ideas of the double brain—I am now turning to No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger and its associated manuscript iterations to see how features like the Duplicates similarly investigate marginal psychological themes.
Spencer Lane

Spencer Lane is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Tufts University. His research broadly focuses on the environmental humanities, considering the relationship between representations of the natural world and expansionist ideology and politics in the nineteenth-century United States of America. His dissertation, Frontiers of Form: Autobiography and Identity in the American West, looks at an often-dismissed genre of travel writing in the West that emerged in the antebellum years, arguing for its centrality in nineteenth-century debates over western expansion, national and literary-national identity, and individual citizenship.
At Quarry Farm, Spencer will research the third chapter of his dissertation, which will examine Roughing It in relation to the postbellum popular cultural obsession with the West and in the tradition of the frontier autobiography. Spencer argues in the first two chapters of his dissertation that the frontier autobiography emerged among the literati in the antebellum decades to help America define itself in and through the terrain of the West; in this third chapter, then, he proposes that in the postbellum decades this identification found full-throated expression amidst intensified urbanization, immigration, and industrialization and their attendant alienation, corruption, and cynicism—decades typically called the Gilded Age. As faith in American institutions faltered, the culture industry looked westward to try to snatch back a feeling of authenticity that seemed to be lost. Twain’s return to the genre that initially helped establish American faith in the West as a store of national character, individual regeneration, and literary inspiration critiques the insufficiency of the culture industry’s nostalgic regurgitation of that faith. Spencer will look to Twain’s letters, western journalism, and other archival materials at Quarry Farm to help him develop and refine this proposed line of thinking.
Susan Poulson

Susan Poulson is a Professor of History at the University of Scranton in northeast Pennsylvania, where she teaches twentieth-century US history and the history of American women. Her publications have been in gender, higher education and women’s rights and include Suffrage: The Epic Struggle for Women’s Right to Vote (Praeger, 2019), which chronicles the seventy-two-year struggle for the Nineteenth Amendment. Her current research is on the rising use of the insanity defense during the Gilded Age.
At Quarry Farm, she will be writing a manuscript that examines two high-profile murder trials in 1870-71. Both defendants were involved in love triangles and pled not guilty by reason of insanity, a new legal concept imported from Great Britain. Many Americans were skeptical of this defense, however, including Samuel Clemens, who warned that attorneys will use it to manipulate gullible jurors and undermine justice. He railed against its abuse in editorials and in his first co-authored novel, The Gilded Age. She will also examine how Clemens’ observations of American life relate to the rise of an ostensible new disease—neurasthenia—first “discovered” by respected physician Dr. George Beard in 1869. Dubbed “Americanitis” for its high rate of diagnosis in burgeoning Gilded Age cities, the disease, Beard asserted, was caused by the frenetic nature of modern American life.
Patrick Prominski

Patrick Prominski is an assistant professor of English at Grand Rapids Community College where he teaches composition, literature, and courses in the honors program. In addition, he serves as the coordinator of first-year composition, and is the faculty writing advisor for Display – the student arts magazine at GRCC. His research focuses primarily on science in nineteenth-century American literature and depictions of scientific professions in fiction. His most recent publication is “Samuel Thomson’s Crusade: Populism, Folk Remedy, and Tradition in Timothy Flint and Catharine Maria Sedgwick,” which appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of Literature and Medicine.
At Quarry Farm, I’ll be completing my work, “Imagined Order: Microscopy and Discovery in Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘The Diamond Lens’ and Mark Twain’s ‘Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” and “The Great Dark.’” The essay began as a presentation solely on O’Brien’s 1858 short story at the 2023 Quarry Farm Symposium, but it quickly grew to include Twain and his interest in scientific advancements. I am particularly interested in the Mark Twain and Cyril Clemens collections for their primary resources in the form of Twain’s correspondence. The John Tuckey Papers may also provide possible sources through Tuckey’s work on “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” (1905) and “The Great Dark” (1898). The project ultimately seeks to expand and detail for scholars of the nineteenth century what readers would have understood about professional and amateur practitioners of science, general attitudes toward the professionalization of sciences, and everyday reading habits that often juxtaposed reporting of scientific breakthroughs alongside fiction that examined the events and advancements of the day.
Nancy Quintanilla

Nancy Quintanilla is an Associate Professor of Hemispheric American Literature in the English and Modern Languages department at Cal Poly Pomona. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, and has published work in journals such as Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano/a Studies, Label Me Latina/o, and the MLA Options for Teaching series. Her research explores transnational cultural and political exchanges, particularly at the intersections of U.S.–Latin America relations, anti-imperialism, and decolonial studies. At Cal Poly Pomona, she teaches courses in Hemispheric American literature, US Latinx studies, and Multicultural Literature in the US.
I am currently working on a comparative study of Mark Twain’s and José Martí’s critiques of imperialism, focusing on how their rhetorical strategies and political goals reflect their respective positions in the Americas. As a Quarry Farm Fellow, my research will explore how Twain’s use of satire and moral critique to address U.S. imperialism contrasts with Martí’s revolutionary tone and direct focus on U.S. expansionism as a threat to Latin America’s sovereignty and cultural identity. By examining rare materials in the Quarry Farm archives, I hope to deepen my analysis of the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of anti-imperialist thought, and to ultimately contribute to a broader transnational discourse on US imperialism. My goal is to expand the intersections between Twain Studies and Latin American intellectual publications.
Aliza Theis
2025 Michael J. Kiskis Quarry Farm Fellow

Aliza Theis is a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century intellectual history, print culture, landscape, and coloniality. Aliza received a Master’s in Education from Harvard GSE and taught high school English for seven years in Brooklyn and San Francisco. In addition to classroom teaching, Aliza served as Dean of Curriculum and Instruction, English Department Chair, lead lesson planner, and instructional coach.
Toward the end of Pudd’nhead Wilson, after the first day of trial, Tom Driscoll—who thinks he is a white enslaver but was actually born as a slave—boasts that his crime will “take its place with the permanent mysteries” (329). In a revision, Twain added, “and people won’t get done trying to guess out the secret of it for fifty years” (329). These quotes seem prescient given the decades of scholarship that have attempted to inspect Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (published together in 1894) for some deeper truth about Mark Twain and his post-Reconstruction mindset. A survey of critical responses reveals how we yearn to both understand what Twain was up to in publishing these linked stories and pin down what they say specifically about race. My project argues that Twain himself invites both of these inquiries—and gestures at how they might be mutually constitutive. At Quarry Farm, I will develop my article, currently titled “The Inspection of Race and the Detection of Authorship in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins,” and examine the relationship between racial and authorial identity making in the combined works. Drawing from the Mark Twain Project and UC Press’s recent “Authoritative Edition,” I will probe the works’ textual history to show how Twain positions his authorship as the subject of detection.