Autobiographical Statement

In high school, I wanted to be a writer and so my goal in going to college was to find a place where I could learn as much as possible. St. John’s College, with its “great books” program, appealed to my need for a very serious, rigorous education. St. John’s offered (and offers) a four-year program of study, the same program of study for all 400 students. Its heart is the seminar, which meets twice weekly in the evening for at least two hours and focuses on works that have been the most influential in western thought. In addition, there are four years of math tutorials where reading ranges from Euclid’s Geometry to Newton’s Principia to Einstein’s papers on relativity; two years of Greek and two years of French language and literature; three years of lab science which carefully works through a history of science, reading primary texts and redoing crucial experiments; and one year of music theory. There are no majors at St. John’s; my B.A. is in liberal arts.  

What I have taken from my undergraduate education, at least as significant as the works I’ve studied, is the importance of an inquiry based, student centered approach to learning where dialogue is at the heart of the learning experience. It was this experience that awakened life-long learning for me, in ways I didn’t anticipate.

While I was an undergraduate student my passion became philosophy—first Greek philosophy and language—and then political philosophy (Locke, Rousseau) and finally German philosophy, particularly Kant and Hegel. When I decided to go to graduate school, however, I’d had a revelation that led me to believe that narrative truth is all the truth there is, and so I went to the University of Virginia to study literary theory. This was at a time when both E.D. Hirsh and Richard Rorty were in the English department at U.Va. Then a funny thing happened: I ended up taking an African American literature class with Charles Rowell, the long-time editor of Callaloo. I fell in love with this literature—and I left Virginia for the Afro-American Studies department at Indiana University and have been an African Americanist ever since.

In terms of my teaching career, my focus has been literary study, American studies, and the teaching of writing. In English departments I've taught African American literature and American literature, as well as various kinds of writing courses, and through American Studies I've taught interdisciplinary American studies classes as well as African American studies.  I’ve been a full-time faculty member at two institutions known for the education of K-12 teachers, and have been very involved along the way in bridging distances between K-12 and university/college education. I have enjoyed working with students from diverse educational backgrounds as they determine what they want from their own college or university educations.

As Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences at Ithaca College, I aim to keep alive my academic specialization in African American literary scholarship.  I also happily pursue interdisciplinary inquiry that begins with “lightbulb” moments and develops as way leads on to way. As an educator I believe in intellectual inquiry for its own sake, creative expression that brings joy and insight, and character development so that we learn how to do right by the world and in the world.