Research Flashcards
(22 cards)
***Describe your current research. Will you be continuing in this research track? Describe your future research plans.
They want to learn about how your expertise fits into their departmental needs as expressed by the job ad, and connects with the work of the people doing the interview (which is why your METHODOLOGY and CONTRIBUTION are actually the most important portion of your answer), and is quickly getting funded and published in ways that bode well for tenure. At the same time, they observe how you express yourself, how self absorbed you are or aren’t.
First, describe: topic, theme, what is intriguing
Then, analyze: good material/data, familiarity with current theory
fit with needs of department (job ad)
connect with what committee members work on
Brian White: I teach literature, film, cultural studies and critical theory, and writing courses. I have studied, and have degrees in, Theatre, British and Commonwealth studies, and English. published work in experiential education, Ureca faculty advisor
Leslie Robinson: Academic Success Coach for the TRIO program
Q: What are opportunities for faculty to contribute, perhaps in terms of coordination or partnership or helping to direct students to the program, to help students not only stay on track but make the most of their education at Graceland?
Karen Gergely: art
Cat Clifford: working on space in royal palaces and places of performance
Sophia Lopez: soccer, music
TOPIC (what): movement; I look at representations of physical mobility and habitation of spaces to examine slavery and expansion in 19c literature. The major conflict stems from the proliferation of impairment and immobility in works that are concerned about motion associated with various forms of expansion and escape from slavery.
THEME (meaning): these works offer new ways of thinking about who gets to be an expansionist, impossibility of escape; a more central role of space (both natural and built); how writers often communicate deviations from 19c conventions of movement/progress through re-configurations of bodies
METHODOLOGY:
transnationalism: shifting borders (cultural, historical, geographical)–interrogating “America” (empire: Kaplan, Murphy)
interdisciplinary: media/non-written, history, culture
intersectionality: see intersections and tensions, not just plurality
disability + the body
environmental + land + colonialism
SCHOLARS:
Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (1996)
Monique Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology (2013)
CONTRIBUTION
My book project joins ongoing efforts to address the persistence of U.S. exceptionalism in American Studies, particularly in the wake of the transnational turn. Since the early calls to decenter the US in the field (and here I’m thinking of Janice Radway’s 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association and echoed by subsequent presidents such as Amy Kaplan, Shelley Fishkin, and Emory Elliott), there have been robust work in transnational American studies. But as many have pointed out, including Donald Pease and John Carlos Rowe in their 2011 collection, Reframing the Transnational Turn, much of the local gets lost in the privileging of the global. My attention to smaller movements does not revert back to a kind of nationalism but offers a more entangled globality. I examine 19c texts that, on the one hand, exemplify the conventions of the period’s genres with their normative concepts of movement. They are frontier fiction, slave narratives, travel accounts, and abolitionist novels. However, they also, surprisingly, dwell on immobilities and impairments where bodies are often stuck in space and entangled with other bodies, with objects, and with the environment. I attend to what I describe as “entangled mobilities” to gain a deeper understanding of structures of power that play out on the minute level, in spaces that are not institutional, and by bodies that are not normative. Through four concepts of mobility I call settler, renegade, fugitive, and maroon, I argue that these texts reconfigure the liberal concepts of movement as they either resist slavery and expansion or advance them. Ultimately, they rethink the concepts of tyranny and resistance in ways that challenge the ideology of Manifest Destiny that governs the U.S. nation.
How would you involve graduate/undergraduate students in your research?
Capstone projects, independent study
Where do your research strengths lie? (Quantitative/qualitative, etc.?) Why? What are your research weaknesses? And how will you improve?
If you were to begin it again, are there any changes you would make in your dissertation?
answer
***We see that you have done a lot of conference papers and presentations; we have limited professional development funds. How do you feel about that as a limiting factor? (Will you continue to go and pay your own way – stop doing research? Resent the limitations?)
I will pay my own way
What audiences are you addressing, what are the other hot books or scholars in your field, and how does your work compare with theirs?
What is the cutting edge in your field and how does your work extend it?
How is your dissertation different from other work in your field?
What do you think the most important intellectual debate is in your/our field?
American literary studies in the 21c
audience
hot books and scholars
The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King (2019)
Zakiyyah Jackson, Becoming Human (2020)
cutting edge
most important intellectual debate
How will you go about revising your dissertation for publication?
answer
What is the broader significance of your research? How does it expand our historic understanding, literary knowledge, humanistic horizons?
answer
Can you explain the value of your work to an educated layperson?
answer
***Tell us how your research has influenced your teaching. In what ways have you been able to bring the insights of your research to your courses at the undergraduate level?
insights or research: looking at old things anew, interrogating conventional, dominant readings or understandings of concepts, bringing in different voices is not merely additive, it changes how things are usually done or understood (“America,” racism, empire)
but also, my teaching has influenced my research; the classroom is the laboratory to think through and work through methods and concepts
to work through established body of knowledge in the field such as Richard Slotkin’s thesis about violence on the frontier (Regeneration through Violence)
the topic of my teaching demo–current article
the research method of meta-thinking
the research method of scholarly conversation–when I introduce a major concept in a reading, I usually give a brief intro about the larger debate (Phillis Wheatley)
If you were organizing a special symposium or conference on your research topic, which scholars would you invite?
answer
In what journals do you expect to publish your research?
What are your publication plans arising from the dissertation?
Tell us about your publication plans.
answer
Tell us briefly what theoretical framework you used in developing your research?
Who are the biggest scholarly influences on your work?
answer
***How does your research address culture, language, race, ethnicity, socio-economic factors?
My research has these concerns in the foreground.
What is left out of the talk?
answer
What is the most significant piece of research that you have read in the last year?
answer
***What do you envision for creating a research program here?
answer
***Do you plan to apply for research funding?
yes. Huntington Library in Los Angeles, the Newberry in Chicago (short term)
What is the funding record of your field?
answer
***We have a large teaching load here – 12 hours per term; how would you manage this and still work on doing research and publishing?
***How would you balance your teaching duties and your own research plans?
I do bits of research reading/writing during the teaching months, but do the bulk of research work during breaks such as holidays and the summer
Tell us about a research project in which you’ve been involved that was successful and one that was not. Why do you think these were the outcomes?
answer
***We notice you were trained at a large public institution; how do you feel you’ll fit in at a small, private institution like ours?
***answer this in terms of research
Graceland University educates students for advanced study, for productive careers and for rich lives. Its student body is a targeted, yet diverse group that includes persons of different ages, backgrounds and national origins who share a commitment to learning. Its curriculum, firmly rooted in the liberal arts tradition and enhanced by career-oriented practical experiences, affirms different styles of learning and prepares students to become competent professionals. Its highly qualified faculty excel in teaching and engage in scholarly, creative and professional activities. Together with the administration and staff, they care deeply about students.
Graceland offers a learning environment for the residential as well as the non-residential student that nurtures personal growth. Its challenging academic program stresses the joy of lifelong learning, the rigor of intellectual discipline and the relationship of both to a satisfying professional and personal life. Its size fosters genuine concern for the individual while providing fellowship and a sense of belonging. For the residential student, its rich co-curricular program of interest groups, athletics, student government, residential life and leisure activities provides opportunity to develop interpersonal skills, relationships, creativity and leadership.
Based on the Christian values of human dignity, mutual respect and social responsibility, Graceland University welcomes persons of all faiths. It actively supports the counsel of its sponsoring denomination, the Community of Christ, to “learn by study and by faith” and indeed offers tangible expression of the church’s commitment to the open and free pursuit of knowledge through higher education.
Graceland promotes opportunity, justice and world peace through practical and visionary action.
smaller student body and class sizes = more focus on students, build better relationship through advising and mentoring; more intimate learning
a welcome change of environment–a more close-knit community
What do you think of Nelson’s new book?
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