Pre-conference Workshops and Seminars
A Workshop for Graduate Students and Academic Professionals
(this workshop is combining two previously separate workshops, Staying Alive and Graduate Student Workshop)
This revised pre-conference workshop will bring together graduate students and experienced faculty to explore the opportunities and challenges of an academic career. Workshop facilitators and participants will offer practical advice and shared wisdom for beginning and living an emotionally, ethically, and spiritually healthy life in academia.
The first half of the workshop will focus on the organizing fiction of academia—the model career that holds out the promise of a fulfilling life that begins with graduate school and proceeds through temporary and tenure-track jobs to the tenure review, promotion, and retirement. We will then share practical strategies for imagining and building sustainable professional identities in particular programs, institutions and the profession. During the second half of the workshop will use breakout sessions focused on stages of the academic career. Participants will negotiate the relationship between professional aspirations and realities, the prospects of interdisciplinarity and the futures of academic disciplines and programs, the range of academic positions and institutions available to ecocritics, as well as the life trajectories of careers that unfold outside the academy.
Graduate students and younger faculty, as well as colleagues at more advanced stages of their careers, will be sharing ideas about academic life before the conference at www.onstayingalive.wordpress.com and we will be considering ways to use this online forum to continue building a sustainable vision of academic life in the years to come.
Workshop Leaders
Tom J. Hillard (ASLE Executive Council Member) Tom is a professor of English at Boise State University, where he teaches courses on early American literature, nature writing, western American literature, and the literary Gothic. He is also Coeditor of the Boise State University Western Writers Series. His current research focuses on the intersections between fear, nature writing, and the literary Gothic in American literature and culture. He recently edited and compiled and online teacher’s guide to the book The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine, edited by Barry Lopez (Milkweed Editions 2007). From 2005-2007, he served as one of ASLE’s Graduate Student Liaisons.
Rochelle Johnson (ASLE past president) Rochelle is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at The College of Idaho, where her courses focus on early American literature and the environmental humanities. Her publications, which include Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation (Georgia, 2009), focus on Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, and nineteenth-century American environmental aesthetics. She has co-edited three volumes on Susan Fenimore Cooper, and she is currently at work on a biography of Cooper. She lives with her husband and daughter a block from campus in southwestern Idaho.
Sarah Jaquette Ray (ASLE Graduate Student Liaison) Sarah is a professor of English and Coordinator of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. She received her Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences, Studies, and Policy from the University of Oregon in 2009. She has an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Religious Studies and Women's Studies from Swarthmore College. Her research interests are environmental justice, cultural/human geography, cultural studies, and environmental humanities. She teaches writing, geography, ecocriticism, and literature and environment. Ray lives "out the road" from Juneau with her husband James, dog Skye, and their new baby girl, Hazel.
Mark Long, Department of English, Keene State College,
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keene.edu.
Mark is chair of the English Department and long-time coordinator of ASLE’s mentoring program.
cinci.rr.com.
John is an ecocritic, nature writer, and former ASLE president with over 30 years experience in higher education.
