To conclude our series on humanities PhDs working full-time off the tenure track, we have Colleen Kennedy, who earned her English PhD from The Ohio State University in 2015. Her dissertation considered the role of odors, aromas, and other olfactory descriptors in early-modern literature. Today, she works in the publicity unit of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. What is your job...
Welcome back to our series on humanities PhDs who are now working full-time off the tenure track! This week brings us Katherine Kidd, who earned her English PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016. Her dissertation looked at depictions of queer and non-normative people in the working class and below the poverty line, and considered how to reintegrate class and queer politics in the...
This week, we continue our series on humanities PhDs who are now working full-time off the tenure track. We interviewed former Broadly Textual Pub contributor Melissa Welshans, an alumna of the English PhD program at Syracuse University, where in 2017 she defended her dissertation on gender and sexuality in the institution of marriage in early-modern England. Now, she holds the position of...
Picture this: You’re a PhD student. For whatever reason, you’ve decided to look for a career outside the academy, or at least off the tenure track. But while your PhD program gave you a lot of preparation for a tenure-track job, veering off this prepared path isn’t something you’ve been trained for. What do you do next? Which path will you choose? This month, we’re interviewing people with...
Summer is not yet over, and we’re not quite open for business yet. But we’re behind the scenes getting ready for the new season with a brand-new menu of writers, fresh ideas, and sparkling conversation. Keep an eye out. We’ll be turning our “Closed” sign to “Open” on Tuesday, September 3. (Writers new and old are always welcome to contribute. Check out...
“Next time someone tells Bronx girls to take off their hoops, they can just say they’re dressing like a Congresswoman.”Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) Every year, I make a feminist New Year’s resolution: apologize less; shut down more mansplaining; take up more space. Sometimes I mean this last one literally: I’ve learned to square my shoulders and stake my place in crowded subways, and to...
This week is 2018’s Asexual Awareness Week (October 21-28), so I want to revisit a post that I wrote four years ago. (Ray Osborn will return with a final installment of poetry next week.) This article below was the first time that I would publicly write about asexuality. I was not out when I wrote it. But response to this post was positive, and the editor of our web magazine (know as Metathesis...
[5 minute read] (CW: pet death) For a year, two of my colleagues shared an office across from mine. They were best friends, and they stocked their space with craft beer and a reclaimed yellow armchair, squishy and velveteen, and spent their office hours in conversation together. Maybe it was because my own best friend lived abroad and my office lunches were pretty lonely, but this scene...
[5 minute read] The problem with asexuality, as I’ve discussed before, is that it is hard to talk about on its own terms — even in a grammatical sense. For example: If you’re homosexual, you can say, “I’m sexually attracted to people of my same gender.” If you’re pansexual, you can say, “I’m sexually attracted to all genders.” These are positive constructions: I do experience attraction to x. But...
[7 minute read] (CW: discussion of sexual violence in fanfic.) Can I tell you a secret? I knew the titular character of BBC’s Sherlock had become one of the mascots of the ace community before I even watched the show — and I defended his reputation as such before I watched it, too, as evidenced in a text conversation between myself and my best friend: Best Friend: Omg, you have to watch Sherlock...