Diversity Statement
As a teacher, I am committed to finding ways to mentor a diverse student population. Having worked at four very different universities, I also understand that building an inclusive classroom has no one-size-fits-all solution. In all cases, though, I believe that it requires attending to the particular students who are enrolled in a course—to their individual needs as well as to their group dynamic.
In my current position, centering diversity in my classes sometimes requires me to redirect students’ own assumptions about who they are as a group. I have found that many well-meaning students refer to a collective “we” that takes for granted a shared identity and common set of privileges. Regardless of who, specifically, is in the classroom at a given moment, I point out the loaded nature of this language as a way of reminding all students that higher education should be for everyone. One of the broader aims of my teaching is to resist the institutional view of diversity as merely an asset for those who are white and/or wealthy.
Because the canon of eighteenth-century English literature has long foregrounded white, and usually male, writers, it can sometimes feel as if diversifying a syllabus is also an exercise in tokenization. In recent years, however, I have come to believe that this is a false problem. Issues of race—and other aspects of identity—are not extraneous or dispensable topics, even when the central object of study is as white and (seemingly) heteronormative as Jane Austen’s fiction. Particularly when I am building a course that focuses on canonical authors, I ask myself how what has been excluded or omitted might in fact be integral to the subject at hand. In my course on Austen, for instance, I highlight Austen’s own status as a social critic and as a figure who could not be represented in her own works. Framing Austen’s efforts in this way enables me to situate issues of class, race, and empire as thematically and critically continuous with her novelistic project. Thus, in addition to works by Austen, we read Jo Baker’s 2013 novel Longbourn, which imagines the lives of servants only cursorily alluded to in Pride and Prejudice. We also consider the impacts of race, slavery, and British imperialism on conceptions of romance and companionate marriage through discussions of works such as The Woman of Color, an anonymously authored novel from 1808, which depicts a biracial heiress navigating the English marriage market.
In my research, I am motivated by the same political and intellectual commitments that animate my teaching and course design. Across these areas of my work, I engage with scholarship in Black and Indigenous Studies, which have led me to think differently about what constitutes the long eighteenth century as a historical field. Work by scholars such as Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, and Kyle Powys Whyte has challenged eighteenth-century studies to recognize the ongoing nature of occupation and displacement in the Americas, as well as the persistence of white supremacy over the past three hundred and more years. I aim to remain attuned to these political realities while holding in mind the complexity of historical change and the non-homogeneity of the past. For instance, in an article forthcoming from The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, which is adapted from my book project, I show how the culture of early capitalism both depended upon—and helped to produce—a modern racial hierarchy grounded in antiblackness. In my research and teaching, I work to develop frameworks for registering and analyzing the continuities, as well as differences, between past and present modes of racial and imperial violence.
Beyond the shape of my courses or the content of my research, I believe that the most important aspect of my job is the interpersonal work of helping students recognize and realize their intellectual and professional goals, especially when they face structural barriers. At the University of Chicago, I worked for two years as a preceptor with the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Program, an initiative that aims to increase diversity in higher education institutions by offering academic resources to students of color and other underrepresented groups. In this role, I had the privilege of working with undergraduates from liberal arts colleges and research universities across the country. I met with the students in Chicago and, over the course of a ten-week program, led intensive weekly tutorials that helped them develop and carry out an independent research project. I also provided sustained mentorship in weekly individual meetings. In the years since, I have continued to maintain mentoring relationships with several students from the program. I have helped them revise and refine writing samples and statements of purpose, written letters of recommendation, consulted with them about professional plans, and supported them in their transitions into graduate school.
My experiences with Mellon Mays taught me early on in my career that mentorship must include an attunement to and appreciation for students’ larger lives, including the distinct challenges they may face. While I am not always the right person for the job, so to speak, I try to be available to assist them when they are unsure who else to call on. Being present involves listening to and trusting students’ accounts of their experiences, even when they are not identical to my own, and even when I cannot entirely solve the problems they are encountering. Whether I am leading a class discussion or mentoring students individually, my priority is to create a space in which all of my students will feel both welcome and heard.
As a transmasculine person who experiences misgendering with some frequency, I know what it is like to feel illegible or out of place in an institutional setting. But as a person who has transitioned only relatively recently, largely during the period of Covid-19 isolation, I feel particularly moved to extend generosity to others who are similarly (and differently) on journeys to live authentically. Transitioning as an adult presented a number of distinct challenges—financial, physical, emotional, and social. I often found that the energy required merely to stay afloat left little remaining for the professional tasks I had so long believed were central to my value as a person, and I regularly wrestled with guilt and shame as a part of my process. Three years in, I am thrilled to be returning to work as myself. Now, though, across my work—research, teaching, and service—I mean to incorporate the lessons I learned through transition: that living authentically sometimes requires decentering work and attending to other parts of our selves; and that all people have the capacity to think and live differently.