The Kind of Scholar I Want To Be

My department is revising the tenure and promotion deadlines for incoming positions so I've spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about what should earn tenure. I am at a small liberal arts college that is an HBCU so for our annual evaluations teaching counts for 60%, scholarship is 20%, and service (to department, university, community at large) is also 20%. The university has their "floor" policy (I have no clue why it is called this) that we as a department can go above but we can't go under. Because we're an English AND Digital Media department a lot of the discussion was about what for DM we needed to consider for the tenure requirements. We ended up including peer reviewed shorter pieces (articles, chapters) and monographs, creative works for our poets and writers, and digital media products, leaving it to the scholar to prove, explain their work. We added conferences and invited talks, although I've heard it said a couple times here that those don't count.

For teaching we did not make many changes, but we did compress/revise a long list to the more inclusive syllabus and course design and weight it more, since that included assignments, syllabus, etc.

For service, we didn't have a lot to change or add. Because we're a small school we all do a lot of service, and we're assigned department and university work so that's not really a piece we have to worry about not hitting. I'm on and chair our department General Education committee.  For the university I serve on the QEP committee, on the GE advisory board, the school curriculum committee, the academic advisory board, the teaching advisory board. Last year and this I served on hiring committees.

Last year and this I also have run pedagogy workshops which I've enjoyed. Last year I focused on serving students and accessibility. This year I focused on practical pedagogy. Next year I plan on focusing on writing across the curriculum and supporting other departments. I enjoy doing this. Last year I also did continuing education workshops for the community.

I am also the program coordinator for English, but that's a stipend, not an assigned service. As program coordinator though I do the curriculum revisions, organize events for students, advising and registration meetings, run the social media (Twitter and blog), and send list-serv updates to majors.

So I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a scholar, to be an assistant professor. Of what my life looks like here. This is only my second year, and the past year has been the pandemic. So I have really only experienced one semester of "normal" here. We only have two tenured faculty in our department, and most people have only been here a year or two longer than me so we're a relatively new/young department.

One of the first things I did last year when I started was to look at our tenure and promotion guidelines, both the university and departmental, and plan out the scholarship piece. I was not worried about doing well on the teaching or the service, and because with scholarship so much depends on editors, journals, and timelines and delays out of your control, I wanted to focus on that.

For the tenure and promotion guidelines *I* am under teaching is 60%, scholarship 20%, and service is 20% BUT you have to score 85% or above on each category. For scholarship you need to publish three peer reviewed pieces/articles or a book (yes, we've talked about how those are not the same). Some people in our department went up for tenure review instead of their third year review, one went up in the regular, 5th year. Our school lets people go up when they think they're ready, does not restrict by year, and if you don't get it your first time, you're allowed to go up again.

I had a couple of goals for my first years.

I decided not to apply to or go to conferences the first couple of years because I knew the learning curve would be steep learning my new position, and I wanted to build in time to get to know my students, the university, the department. So when the pandemic hit I did not have any conferences or travel to cancel. I've made the decision not to apply for this next year either. I can do this in part because my school allows me to. I'd like to make it a regular thing to take our students to SAMLA when it's held in state. I'd like to go back to present at PCA/ACA in the spring. I'm fine with not traveling a lot, not taking time away from teaching. 

I also wanted to focus on meeting my tenure publication requirements by my third year review so that I could cross that off my list and not worry about it. Last year I had a chapter in an edited collection on the presentation of the devil as a symbol of the culture wars The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of  Christ in The Bible Onscreen in the New Millenium, ed. Wickham Clayton. This year/month I have a chapter on how Roman Catholicism presentations in horror films acts as popular culture/folklore of beliefs to non-Catholics in the roles of priests, the knowledge they have, and the rituals they perform in Theologyy and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination ed. Brandon R. Grafius and John W. Morehead. Next year (hopefully?) the edited collection I'm co-editing on nostalgia and horror and my chapter in it on older final girls will be published. So that's my three. And next year I submit my stuff for my third year review so I hope/think that's all okay.

My plan is that with the required number met I can turn back to rethinking my book, which I have mostly planned out and rethought through, but have not had a chance the last couple of years to really work on, although I think I have the heart of the first chapter redone (although another scholar read it and mostly trashed it as not fitting in the field, so maybe not).

I've written before that I write for me. My first publication was a co-written chapter for an edited collection in 2013. Whether it's these blog posts or articles or chapters I still write for me. I think part of that is because WHEN I first published, I was teaching high school, adjuncting for the local community college, and teaching online. A lot of my publications are just me writing about the things I think are cool. European horror video games, a couple of articles and chapters on Freddy Krueger, as a bogeyman and the practical aesthetics and effects in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game, an article on the folkloric forest in Twin Peaks, a New Mexican folk hero Elfego Baca. If there's a throughline in my work, and certainly how I describe it, is that I look at folkloric figures in popular culture and analyze how they're a reflection of their historical and cultural moment. This work is informed my background in pre-modern and early modern English literature. In this way my most recent chapter in Theology and Horror is an excellent example of this. It looks at exorcists and the Rite of Exorcism in The Exorcist, The Rite, and The Conjuring, framing the performance of Catholic rituals as a type of commonly understood folklore/belief even by non-Catholics, but it also provides the pre-modern and early modern context for exorcism, the history.

This approach, of applying the folkloric to popular culture while informed by the pre and early modern, of presenting this as a model for scholarship, is my contribution if I can call anything that.

Because I tend to write what I want, on whatever I feel like doing, and most importantly my job lets me, I know I'm never going to be a name in my field. I know (of) people who are rock stars in their fields. Big names. People who will CONTRIBUTE TO THE FIELD. Who will publish regularly in the big journals in their field. That is not me. I once submitted to a big name journal, they took over two years to get back to me then told me it was a ridiculous approach and I clearly had no idea what I was doing. I let another scholar read another article I was planning to submit to a journal and was asked if I was sending it to some experimental journal because it didn't follow any of the formulas it should have. My book based on my dissertation was rejected wholesale in a pretty cold manner by an editor who did a 180 from the enthusiasm and support they showed previously.

These things hurt at the time. They certainly fed into me thinking me being in this/these fields were not for me. I don't write the way other people do. I don't write ON topics other people do. I combine fields. I ignore periodization. I've made my peace with it, mostly because I am lucky enough to have a position that lets me. If for any reason I was to not be in this position any more I'd go back to high school teaching and be done with academia. It would just be one less thing I did honestly. 

But for now, I am happy writing and creating the way I do.

And honestly, it's still a total kick to see something I wrote in print. It's just silly and cool.

But the thing that seems totally rockstar cool is seeing other people cite what I wrote. The first time I saw my name in Google Scholar as a citation and not my own work, was a total gas. Surreal.

But do you know what's even better? Seeing up and coming scholars cite my work in their thesis, in their dissertation. Two such pieces popped up in my Google Scholar searches recently and I just wanted to share them. Brianna Reeves' MA thesis, The Evolution of the Satan Figure: From 14th Century Literature to 20th Century Popular Culture (2018) is very cool work. Kevin McGuiness' interdisciplinary dissertation on The Cinematic Boogeyman: The Folkloric Roots of the Slasher Villain (2019) is also some excellent work. And I'm not just saying that because they cite me. They do exactly the work I think is cool- collapsing the barriers between folklore and literature and popular culture. It's excellent work by itself, but also for the model it presents.

Also- look at this! In what world do I get cited in the same sentence as Zipes? Just wacky.

For me, other than being able to write and do what I want, the thing I hope I can be is generous. I want to support people, share my teahcing stuff, listen to people. Advocate for folks who are in more precarious positions than myself. Just like with my teaching, I could not care less honestly whether my students remember some arcane pre modern factoid or how to read Shakespeare's sonnets. I care that they learn ho to think, interact, discuss, argue, read, choose literature, express themselves. Be models for kindness, support, change. Those are the things I hope they carry out of my class. The idea that maybe there's a different way, and my favorite cliche, "they can contribute a verse."

For me the kind of scholar I want to be is the type of teacher I want to be. Generous. Kind. Operating outside of the box, the structure.

I don't know if my future is going to end up down a scholarly path. The world all feels a lot more precarious than it once did. But for now I guess I'll keep doing this. And see how it goes. Because the simple fact is, you have to live with yourself. You have to, no matter who you are, create a life you can live with. You have to treat people in a way you can live with. You may face consequences for this. You may have to fight for it. You may lose your privilege or position because of it.

But at the end of the day you have to build a life you can live WITH. Whatever that looks like.

So I do that. And in whatever small ways try to make it better than I found it.