Introduction & Committee Reports
Announcements
The ESA sound conference is happening on March 31st. Go! Read the program here:
The admitted student welcome events are next Friday 3/17. Please come if you are around and help recruit.
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Here’s the schedule:
2pm – faculty panel: “Recovery, Rereading, and Hesitation,” about the challenges of archival research as we work to diversify pre-20th century fields, especially regarding collections that do not fit the traditional model of the archive. We are structuring this as a roundtable, so please feel free to add your own experiences and ideas during the question period.
4pm-student panel: the graduate experience. Come hear students discuss their experiences of coursework, exams, teaching, dissertating, job-marketing, and making a life in NYC. Again, this is a roundtable, so share your own stories and advice for prospective students. Towards the end of this panel we’ll introduce faculty.
Followed by our usual Friday Forum reception.
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Stefano Morello, Alicia Andrewjeski, Alexis Larsson, Dadland Maye, and Esther Bernstein have been awarded ESA travel grants of $100 a piece. They will be presenting on a range of topics, including The O.C., Shakespeare’s Richard III, Hebrew Crusade Chronicles, Donald Trump and the Bateson archives.
We have started reaching out to first years to test the waters and see who is interested in being assigned a mentor at their CUNY school. The mentor would share teaching materials, and invite the student to sit in on a class. We will send out an email soon soliciting mentors for those who want one. Would anyone like to volunteer? Also, we are beginning to collate teaching materials on a dropbox to upload to the ESA site. If you have assignments, lesson plans, teaching philosophy statements, syllabi that you are willing to share, email them to Elissa and Catherine with the title of the doc the name of the CUNY school where you’ve used these materials.
Discussion
At the Executive Committee meeting, there was discussion of eliminating the teaching practicums at college campuses and offering our own (required) pedagogy course in Spring semester. Though this couldn’t be instated next year, there was talk of beginning a pilot next Spring. What do people think about this? What ideas can we come up with to recommend at the next Executive Committee meeting?
There are two candidates with very different approaches being considered for hire in the area of Latino/a studies: Richard Perez and Dalia Kandiyoti. Where does student interest lie?
There was also talk at the Exec Committee meeting of having a faculty member in a given area offer a “pre-Orals” independent study for credit. This would be like an early version of the dissertation workshop, and would be one way of responding to a situation in which more and more courses are being cancelled because of lower enrollment, and austerity. Would people be interested in taking such a course?
Mark McBeth is wondering what he should call his position as placement officer; “Officer of Progress Towards Career”? There is some concern that the title should not induce anxiety about professionalization, and should be one that invites students to approach Mark early on in their thinking about their careers. Any opinions about this?
