diversity – Frances Tran

As I prepare for dissertation workshops and fellowship applications in the fall, I am reminded of this important piece of mentoring advice:

Don’t just write your dissertation, but write about it and often.

Writing about your project can be frustrating, unnerving, and even painful, but I have found that it keeps me grounded- it forces me to think about the stakes of my work and reminds me of who I am speaking to, which can be incredibly energizing. In light of this, I have decided to share some of the writing “about” my dissertation that Duncan Faherty (Associate Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY) invited us to complete for the American Studies dissertation workshop I am taking this fall. As always, it took me longer than expected to complete (and is of course far from perfect), but it did get me thinking about my project and the challenge of communicating it to others who might not be familiar with my topic or areas of research.

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Last Friday, the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color project (MFFC) held its final lunch and lecture series so I wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on what has been an incredibly inspiring and generative spring program. First, I’d like to thank Nikhil Pal Singh (Associate Professor of Social & Culture Analysis and History, New York University), Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English, Brandeis University), and Tina Campt (Professor of Africana and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College) for agreeing to share their research and engaging us in conversation. Thanks also to my amazing allies in MFFC whose energies and organizing skills helped make these events such a success.

All three lectures raised important questions that have pushed me to reflect more critically on my own scholarship. Professor Singh’s talk, “Race, Crime and Police Power in the Making of U.S. Empire” reminded me of the important histories of racialized criminality and policing in the United States that will inform my thinking as I explore contemporary forms of racialization and disciplining that manifest within the U.S. academy today. Professor Abdur-Rahman’s discussion of her book, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (2012), introduced a different genealogy for African American literature by tracing the development of tropes of sexual difference, which both excites and inspires me to find other ways of reading and conceiving Asian American literatures in my research. Finally, Professor Campt’s presentation on the serendipitous encounters that led her to her current work on convict photo albums (collected at the Archives of the Western Cape in South Africa) and the haptic dimensions of working in the archive are lessons I will take with me as I prepare for my own archival encounters in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University this summer.

Continue reading “Mentoring Lessons” →