Read last week’s post from Staci.

When asked to write a series of posts on how my PhD work prepared me for a more diverse career path, I knew that I wanted to be helpful while still acknowledging the truth behind finding any sort of employment: so much of it is about luck, not skill and worth. Yes, I have a lot of skills that have made me a good fit for my current job as a tutor manager. They are not necessarily why I was hired, though. I got the job because I was in the right place at the right time. Then, I had the aptitude that allowed me to do well in the role once there. So, to that end, I’m going to discuss two related but ultimately separate things in this week’s post: 1) how to help bolster your luck on the job market and 2) which skills helped me thrive once I had a foot in the door.

So, let’s start with this “luck” business. I am not implying that it was pure luck per se. Rather, I happened to know some people and was able to leverage those connections into a fruitful position. As I’m sure anyone who is on the academic job market knows: getting a tenure-track job is only partially about your actual knowledge and prowess. It’s also about fit, timing, and who you know. This is also true in the other markets. While a non-academic job landscape is much more robust, it’s not all rainbows. You still send out countless resumes to no avail. You still get rejected. So, my main advice for how to translate your PhD experience into a job outside of academia will sound familiar and cliché but, alas, it’s what really does the trick: network.

When I decided to pivot, I first needed to figure out what I wanted to do. While I loved tutoring, I knew it couldn’t sustain me as a full-time career. I thus researched and made a list of all of the different types of jobs one could get while still in the realm of education. I started applying for support staff roles across Bay Area colleges. These sort of jobs would allow me to impact students’ lives while still getting the work-life balance associated with a 9-5 job. I sent out dozens of cover letters and applications and received zero replies. I could not seem to get my skills to translate into an attractive application.

While I was getting very few bites, other opportunities were starting to pop up related to my tutoring side gig. My tutoring manager asked if I could help out with some administrative work. The counselor of one of my students wanted to collaborate with me. It started to become more clear to me that, like in academia, this is how you open doors for yourself. There’s only so much a resume can do. You have to immerse yourself in the field you want to enter in whatever way you can. Put yourself in the position so that you can be in the right place at the right time. Say yes to stuff. As much as possible, go to talks or events in your new desired field. Pick up side gigs (as much as your budget and energy levels can allow). Acknowledge that you are pivoting to a new (if not adjacent) career and have to do some of the grunt work you did the first year of your PhD because, while you have a very advanced pedigree now, you still have to prove yourself. I was very privileged to have a gap year in which to do this. My side gigs paid well (way better than adjuncting!) but they didn’t come with health insurance. I was lucky enough to get that through my partner. This gave me the space and freedom to collect opportunities. So, I give this advice with a grain of salt, an acknowledgement that this isn’t everyone’s situation, and gratitude for the fact that I had that space.

I kept working away at my side gigs, saying yes, and waiting. Then, just by chance, the tutoring company I was working for opened up a salaried staff position. Because I had been such a strong tutor and because I had been helping them out with admin work, they offered it to me. I was organized and hard-working and that’s what they were looking for in an admin support team member. It was ultimately as simple as that. I had been doing good work and I was in the right place at the right time.

It was only once I was in the role that I could really start showing the breadth of my skills and begin to leverage those into a more substantial position. Because of my teaching background, I was able to start helping out with more high-level tasks: interviewing new tutors, training them, and helping them create curriculum for their students. I was well-suited for these responsibilities because of different things I had done as a PhD student: designing and teaching my own courses, serving on a hiring committee for a tenure-track position, training new graduate TAs, acting as a teaching mentor, and organizing an undergraduate conference and multiple conference panels. My research and writing skills also opened up new opportunities to me. I became the company’s resident editor who gives final edits on any communication going out to a large audience. I also advise on strategy for large projects as I am able to think about their scope and the necessary pacing they require. For instance, I just finished launching our online tutoring platform. I helped research the software, trained tutors on how to use it, and advised on marketing it to parents.

Because of my initiative on projects like this and because of my ability to participate in more high-level tasks, my role quickly evolved from an administrative one to a managerial one. After a couple of months, I was promoted to the role of Tutor Services Manager and I am now in charge of hiring, training, and managing a cohort of around 150 tutors across the Bay Area and L.A. Though I do not teach students, I get to teach and mentor teachers. I get to use my aptitude for planning and organization to help them thrive and get students the assistance they need. I get to work from home and have flex time to go to the doctor when needed, which is great for pacing myself and finding the balance I need with lupus.

I don’t share my story to say that this is typical or that your path has to look exactly like this. Essentially, it just worked out. The timing happened to be right for me and, because of the skills I gained through the PhD, I was able to easily adapt to and redefine my role. I’m also very lucky to be a part of a small company that has allowed for this advancement. So, my advice for those looking for positions outside of academia would be this: figure out what you love about academia, what skills you have that would allow you to do that in some capacity elsewhere, and where that elsewhere is. Once you’ve done that, just show up as much as you can and make sure you’re showing everyone the best version of yourself and your skills. There’s only so much a resume can demonstrate about your aptitude.

As I used to tell my writing students and now tell the tutors I mentor: show, don’t tell.

Staci Stutsman holds a BA in English from Western Michigan University (2011) and a PhD in English with an emphasis in film and media studies from Syracuse University (2017). She is currently the Tutor Services Manager at Tutor Corps, a tutoring company based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, where she hires, trains, and manages a cohort of 150 tutors.

The post Show, Don’t Tell: Networking and Showing Up appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

My journey to an alt-ac position was a gradual one. I did not wake up one day and decide that it was time to wave goodbye to my long-held dream of securing a tenure-track job in the humanities. Rather, it was a series of small (and big) events that led me to eventually look around and decide to search for alternate employment avenues.

I entered my English PhD program right out of undergrad. I was a shiny 22-year-old with drive and energy to spare. I attacked coursework and teaching with rigor and enthusiasm. I read all the books, wrote all the seminar papers, attended all the conferences, taught all the classes. In essence, if there was a hoop, I was more than happy to leap through it. And I loved it.

When you’re a first-year PhD student, the threat of the sparse job market is a distant, fuzzy reality. Early on, you get to wrap yourself in the promise of time. There’s time to figure it out. There’s time for the market to become more robust. There’s time to do enough to prove yourself as worthy. You put your head down, you plow through your work, and hope that things will work themselves out by the time you’re ready for the job market.

Time is a tricky thing, though. When you’re in grad school, it seems like there’s never enough time. Because the knowledge of the market looms on the horizon, there is an imperative to make the most of your time every single day, week, month, break. I, for one, was not great at pacing myself. I thrived on constant productivity. A low hum of anxiety propelled me forward.

At some point, in the midst of zooming through my qualifying exams and cranking out my prospectus, I got sick. A couple of months after I began writing my first chapter, I was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus. (Yes, House fans, sometimes it’s lupus.) Soon thereafter, I was diagnosed with lupus nephritis as the lupus had begun to attack my kidneys. Lupus is a disease in which your immune system gets confused and, instead of fighting illness, decides to attack healthy cells and organs. No one really knows what causes lupus. It’s more or less the case that you have a genetic deficiency that can eventually be triggered by, among other things, extreme stress and then, voila, you forever have lupus. This is not to say that the PhD process gave me lupus. It is to say, though, that my unhealthy work habits turned my predisposition for an autoimmune disease into an actual ailment.

My diagnosis wasn’t what turned me to alt-ac, though. At least not right away. Rather, I treated my diagnosis like another problem to be solved, another task to be accomplished. The goal was to find the right treatment plan, get on the right medications, and get back to “normal” so that I could crank out work and stay on schedule. Propelled by heavy doses of steroids for the next year, I was pretty successful. I finished up my dissertation, I defended, and I graduated.

I then embarked on a gap year in which I planned to focus my energy on the job market. I was living with my partner in Oakland, California and picked up a side gig tutoring while I focused on my “real” career: jumping through the next hoop on the path to academic life. Something changed in me once I defended the dissertation, though. Once I didn’t have the institutional pressure to produce, produce, produce (and once my doctors had finally lowered my steroid dose), it was no longer clear to me why I was working around the clock without breaks.

I finally had the time to think about and come to terms with my illness. I learned that it was not something to be managed, fixed, and forgotten. Rather, lupus came with a new reality that I had to confront: stress and lack of sleep triggered flares and further damaged my body. As such, it was important to slow down and take breaks. In turn, slowing down made me realize the things which truly gave me joy: having the time to read a book for pleasure, going to the gym, and cooking meals that were good for my body. Traditional academia definitely allows for those things. I realized, though, that my personality was not suited for making space for them while still in the system. I only knew how to do academia one way: full throttle and anxiety-laden.

At the same time I was coming to this realization about academia and my illness, I was also loving my side gig. I had begun tutoring middle school and high school writing for a Bay Area tutoring company and found it incredibly fulfilling to make sustained, one-on-one connections with students and help them navigate the stressful, tricky world of secondary education. While I always vaguely knew that there were ways to engage in the educational landscape other than pursuing a tenure-track job, it was knowledge that I had to ignore for the most part in order to stay focused.

When I began to embrace the fact that there were other satisfying ways to involve myself in teaching while not hurting myself, I knew that I had to make some changes. It was for this reason that, while in the middle of submitting job applications my first year on the market, I simply…stopped. I began thinking about what other jobs I might enjoy, what skills I had to offer, and what opportunities were available to me in order to make that pivot. It was odd; I was trained in a profession that encourages and develops critical thinking skills but, somehow, while single-mindedly doing that work, I hadn’t taken the time to think critically about whether or not this was where I wanted to be. Having that gap year and the time to reflect about the hoops I was jumping through proved fundamental to removing myself from the academic fray.

While lupus forced me to take the time to think about this, I wish I would have taken a break from performing the academic dance a little earlier on in order to ask myself: What do I want to get out of this and what do I want my life to look like? I think, ultimately, the PhD did get me to where I wanted to be, though that endpoint was different than I originally envisioned. In my next post, I will discuss what my pivot from academia looked like and how I used the rest of my gap year making the skills I learned in my PhD legible to an alt-ac job market. In doing so, I will explain how I leveraged the skills gleaned from a career that was ultimately not the right fit for me.

Staci Stutsman holds a BA in English from Western Michigan University (2011) and a PhD in English with an emphasis in film and media studies from Syracuse University (2017). She is currently the Tutor Services Manager at Tutor Corps, a tutoring company based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, where she hires, trains, and manages a cohort of 150 tutors.

The post On Alt-Ac Careers and Autoimmune Conditions appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

In the first few weeks of class, I often subtly nudge my students into taking the discussion where I want it to go. Sometimes this succeeds and sometimes it fails, but I like to use what I tend to refer to as the “breadcrumb strategy” to guarantee that we will end our conversation in the general vicinity of where I want it to go. I try to plant intellectual breadcrumbs in order to lead them to the revelation that I want them to come to on their own. One of the best ways I’ve found to do this is to show them their own responses, and get them to think closely and critically about how they have reacted to a text.

For example, a couple of weeks ago in my Reading Popular Culture course, I taught a few episodes of The Office (S1E2: “Diversity Day,” S2E12: “The Injury,” S3E1: “Gay Witch Hunt,” S3E23: “Beach Games,” S5E13: “Prince Family Paper”) in order to get them to think about how popular culture constructs its spectators and encourages certain responses. We screened the episodes together at our evening screening and, unbeknownst to them, I took careful note of all of the times that they collectively laughed at the episodes.

In class two days later, I had them talk about why they thought the show was funny. Some of the students gave vague responses, some relied on previous conceptions of the show, and some had been too swayed by the essay we had read that day for class and had forgotten exactly how they originally felt. In order to get to more specific reactions, and in order for us to think critically about ironic humor, I put my collective laughter list on the overhead. Here’s a few examples of some of the times that they laughed during “Diversity Day”:

• Michael: “Say a race you are attracted to sexually”
• Mr. Brown when Michael doesn’t believe that’s his name: “That’s my name, not a test.”
• Michael: “Abraham Lincoln once said if you’re a racist, I’ll attack you with the North”
• Michael to Kelly: “If you leave, we will only have two left… Namaste”
• Oscar: “Mexican isn’t offensive”
• When it is revealed that Stanley must wear the card that says “black”

This worked incredibly well because it jogged their memories. But, more importantly, I made them confront their own reactions to the text and asked them to give justifications for this reaction. This helped us probe the implicit racism in some of the ironic humor and also helped us to think about the ways that the show encourages us to read the humor ironically (aided in part by Eric Detweiler’s essay on irony and The Office). It’s often hard to rein in a conversation about a beloved TV show and return it back to specifics and it’s especially difficult to elicit specific examples and encourage close active reading. This activity, though, asks them to close read their own responses in a sort of self-enacted reception studies approach. Placing this activity so early in the semester primes them for further close reading exercises and also makes them hyper aware of their reactions.

While it’s easier to do this sort of activity when you have a collective group screening, this activity can be adapted to other contexts as well if you have students keep journals of his or her responses to certain texts. Ask them to take note of the points that they laughed, cried, gasped, etc. The only downside to this is that they are aware of the process when it’s happening which will slightly skew the results. But, in general, especially early on in the semester, any activity that makes them aware of their reading and watching practices is well worth it.

I encourage you to try this exercise or one similar and also share some of your ideas here–what types of things have worked extremely well in your classroom?

Staci Stutsman is a fourth year PhD student and teaching associate in the English department.  She will be taking her qualifying exam on film and television melodrama this fall.  She teaches introductory level film and popular culture courses and spends her free time binge watching TV, board gaming, and working out.

The post Teaching Irony and The Office: A Reception Studies Approach appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

As a girl and a woman who was considered obese for most of my adolescence and early adult life, I tend to have strong yet conflicting feelings about weight loss. While my weight vacillated quite a bit, I weighed 225 pounds when I began my weight loss journey six years ago.  My decision to eat healthier and begin to work out regularly was partially born out of a desire to live a more well-rounded life, but my true motivation derived from a place of deep shame created by my own self-doubt about my worth, a culture which tends to defined beauty in narrow (and thin) terms, and a physically and emotionally abusive relationship.  I am very proud of my 80 pound weight loss: I love the invigorating feeling that comes from a brisk fall run, and am increasingly pleased to discover the active things that my body can now physically do.  Though that is true, with time and distance, I have also grown to be proud of the woman I was before. Simultaneously feeling proud of my “new” body and learning not to hate my “old” body makes me ambivalent when it comes to thinking about debates around weight loss. Do I believe that weight loss is necessary if one medically registers as overweight? How does this relate to dominant ideologies of beauty? Am I reinforcing these ideologies by feeling pride in my own weight loss? How do my feminist politics complicate this?

My ambivalence derives from the fact that I don’t necessarily see myself fitting into a pre-defined identity category such as “overweight, “obese,” “fat” “formerly fat,” or “thin.”  These categories seem to have a universalizing effect and potentially speak for experiences that are not mine. There’s no such thing as the experience of the fat girl. I can only tell you about my experience, an experience that is bound up with conflicting feelings of guilt, shame, and pride.

It feels scary to feel ambivalent about any topic in a field that relies on making strongly argued and well-supported claims.  Though that is true, I think that this ambivalence is important because it gives one the chance to parse out the complexities of experience as it relates to actual bodies. We interact with texts and theoretical ideas, but it’s important to remember that what we write and what we theorize have the potential to affect discourses and the ways actual bodies experience the world. My body, like countless others, is one that resists universalizing and needs to be thought of in terms that transcend categories that, like my old blue jeans, don’t quite fit.

Editor’s note: Because this post is framed with a consideration of the ideological implications of before and after photos, the author has elected not to link to outside websites containing before or after photos or to include her own.  ​

Staci Stutsman is a fourth year PhD student and teaching associate in the English department.  She will be taking her qualifying exam on film and television melodrama this fall.  She teaches introductory level film and popular culture courses and spends her free time binge watching TV, board gaming, and working out. 

The post An Ambivalent “Fat Girl”: Weight Loss and Identity Categories that Don’t Quite “Fit” appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Mittell notes that the series is “explicitly gendered by its title, the premise suggests a melodramatic, effeminate focus: a political wife is humiliated by a shameful sex scandal, and forced to both establish her own career and publicly redefine her relationship with her estranged husband” (¶ 41).   While the title is explicitly gendered, it also self-reflexively refers to figures of “the good (house)wife” that have peppered the landscape of television. Think of June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley)​ of Leave it to Beaver, Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) of The Brady Bunch, Clair Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad) of The Cosby Show, Vivian Banks (Janet Hubert) of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Annie Camden (Catherine Hicks) of 7^th Heaven.  One might also think of the roles that progressively worked to call into question the constraints outlined for the on-screen wife: Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) of I Love Lucy, Peggy Bundy (Katey Segal) of Married With Children, Roseanne Connor  (Roseanne Barr) of Roseanne, Debra Barone (Patricia Heaton) of Everybody Loves Raymond, Carrie Heffernan (Leah Remini)  of King of Queens, Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) of Malcolm in the Middle,  Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco) of The Sopranos, the Desperate Housewives, or the Army Wives. (Check out this list or this list of memorable TV wives.)  One might notice that the majority of these wives populate sitcoms (although the women of Showtime’s dramedies serve as a counterpoint to this observation—Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) of Weeds, Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) of Nurse Jackie, Tara Gregson (Toni Collette) of United States of Tara, Cathy Jamison (Laura Linney) of The Big C).  The wife of primetime broadcast television is primarily confined to the sitcom format and to the home. The majority of dramatic wives live on cable or premium channels.

CBS’s The Good Wife, though, begins by uprooting its protagonist Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) from her role as housewife and from her cozy Highland Park home in the very first episode.  After Peter’s (Chris Noth) press conference in which he publicly admits to having an affair with a prostitute and subsequently goes to jail on allegations of using government funds for illegal purposes, Alicia moves into her own apartment with her two children and joins a law firm. She bids farewell to her thirteen years as a housewife and stay-at-home mom as she enters the workforce.  The viewer only glimpses the house and Alicia’s previous life in it through flashbacks or when Alicia visits it in the episode “Long Way Home.” The series doesn’t restrict Alicia to her job, though.  The viewer spends a lot of time with Alicia in and outside of work, in and outside of the home.  The viewer watches Alicia interact with her mother and mother-in-law, her husband, her co-workers, her children, her lover and her friends. The series demonstrates the complexities of motherhood and marriage by defining Alicia by attributes other than “mother” and “wife,” yet still grants a nuanced portrayal of both of those roles.

While the series intrigues the viewer with its case-of-the-week structure, the show also builds a complex world of interwoven personal and professional relationships through its serial storytelling (as Mittell also notes). In doing so, it offers up multiple pleasures to the viewers, pleasures that can very well be defined by their cross-gendered appeal. Though that is true, this format and the extended duration of the television serial also allow the show to slowly deconstruct expectations of stereotypical gender roles as it respectfully revises the figure of the TV good wife. The Good Wife, returning to CBS next Sunday (September 21), promises to deliver more of the same in its sixth season as Alicia considers an offer from Eli Gold (Alan Cumming) to act as State’s Attorney, continues to deal with the fallout of her former lover’s death and her for-appearances marriage, and further negotiates the boundaries of what it means to be “the good wife.” (Other reasons to look forward to Season Six include Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) and all of her necklaces, and all of Alicia’s fantastic outfits.)

Images from cbs.com

Staci Stutsman is a fourth year PhD student and teaching associate in the English department.  She will be taking her qualifying exam on film and television melodrama this fall.  She teaches introductory level film and popular culture courses and spends her free time binge watching TV, board gaming, and working out.

The post The House Wife and The Good Wife appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Recently, the anti-feminist movement has gained increased visibility thanks to the popularity of the tumblr #WomenAgainstFeminism.  Women have submitted photographs of themselves holding up signs that list all of the reasons that they don’t need feminism. These reasons range from “because no one should be shamed for being a stay at home mom” to “I don’t like to degrade men” to being tired of being “represented by hysterical hipster whores.” The two reasons that I saw most often repeated were that “I am not a victim” and “not all men rape.”  It would take a much longer post to fully theorize and explain the reasons why I disagree so heavily with many of these posts, and I don’t want to “fem-splain” why I think they’re wrong about the goals and aims of feminism. But I do want to take the time to outline one of the reasons why I do need feminism in my life, and why it’s important to my life and to my teaching.

As I was keeping up with reports on this tumblr trend a couple of weeks ago (and loving the cat parody rebuttal), I started watching the first season of HBO’s True Blood.  I know I’m about six years behind on this, and I know that much has been said about the intersection of vampire narratives and rape discourse, but one scene in particular struck me as particularly horrifying and relevant to this debate.  In the episode “The Fourth Man in the Fire,” Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) visits the graveyard to visit her vampire boyfriend Bill Compton’s (Stephen Moyer) human grave.  She thinks he was caught in a house fire the night before and has “officially” died. While she exits the gravesite, a hand thrusts from the ground, grabs her leg, and attempts to pull the screaming Sookie into the ground.  A low voice says her name, “Sookie.” The viewer and Sookie realize that her attacker is Bill, and that he is not attacking her but is instead rising from the grave. Sookie’s fear of attack and death transforms into relief and, incidentally, lust. Sookie embraces Bill’s dirty, naked, and newly resurrected body as he raises her hemline and roughly enters her.  This scene feels uncomfortably akin to a rape sequence.  At the moment that I think this, Bill bears his fangs and moves to bite Sookie to suck her blood.  A breathless Sookie says “No, not the neck.” After a beat, Bill does it anyway and Sookie throws her head back in raptured lust and pain. The scene is no longer ambiguous; it is definitely plugging into rape discourse and the close-ups on Sookie’s orgasming face assures viewers that, even though she explicitly said no, Sookie wants it.

I need feminism because images like this have become so prevalent and so naturalized in media and popular culture. I need feminism because I need the tools to understand the discourse that this is tapping into. I need feminism because I need a way to teach my students how to recognize these codes and think critically about the images being handed to them on a daily basis.  To deny victimhood is to deny the daily traumas forced upon both women and men. It’s not as simple as declaring yourself “not a victim.” Yes, not all men rape and yes, some rapists are women.  Among many other things, feminism is interested in helping rape victims find a voice, regardless of the gender of the attacker or the victim.  I need feminism because it helps me process and respond critically to a scene like the one from True Blood, a scene that is just one among many in the sea of popular culture.

Images from hbogo.com

Staci Stutsman is a fourth year PhD student and teaching associate in the English department.  She will be taking her qualifying exam on film and television melodrama this fall.  She teaches introductory level film and popular culture courses and spends her free time binge watching TV, board gaming, and working out.

The post #WhyINeedFeminism appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

I’ve spent a lot of the summer traveling around and visiting friends and family from back home. We eat, we drink, we catch up. Inevitably, these catching-up conversations wind their way back around to one of my loved ones asking, “So, wait, what do you do?”  As an English Ph.D. student just finishing up coursework, I spend a good deal of the academic year sequestered off from the real world; I am absorbed in the latest reading assignment, pushing through a seminar paper, or rushing through that week’s to-do list.  It’s quite easy to forget that there’s a real world out there, a real world filled with actual people who live actual lives that are not dictated by the academic clock.

While there are many competing ideas about how to define the Public Humanities, I believe it means that one should connect in significant ways with the public outside of academia. It means having engaged and sustained conversations about the world, the texts we consume, and our ideas. Kristen Case notes that “the most substantial contribution of the humanities to public life does not come through empowering elite students and faculty members to reach out to their communities.” Instead, it comes from “extending the most fundamental element of a real humanities education—the power to doubt and then to reimagine.”

With this in mind, the Syracuse University English graduate students wish to launch this blog.  This blog is not meant as a benevolent vehicle through which we most graciously bestow our ideas onto the public. Rather, it will be meant as a forum through which to start conversations.  We want to demonstrate exactly “what we do” by doing it with the public.  We want to let the public in on our process as we collectively doubt and then reimagine. We want to use the skills we have gained through our humanities education—the power to think critically about the world, close read, and engage with theory—to have conversations with the public outside of our small cohort, our discipline, and the university. We are interested in hearing how other graduate students are engaging in public humanities pursuits so that we can learn from each other.  We want this conversation to be made widely available, not locked behind a pay wall. And we want to hear others’ voices.

With that said, we welcome you all to this conversation.  A monthly blogger will post weekly and these posts will reflect the diversity of English studies in general and our department specifically. We hope that you read, join in if you wish, and share with others.

Staci Stutsman is a fourth year PhD student and teaching associate in the English department.  She will be taking her qualifying exam on film and television melodrama this fall.  She teaches introductory level film and popular culture courses and spends her free time binge watching TV, board gaming, and working out.

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