Tag Archives: phdlife

Tips for Applying to PhD Programs in the Humanities

As application season gets going, CSGSH members offer advice to prospective doctoral students on applying to PhD programs:


As someone who just completed my Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures, I can offer three pieces of advice for people considering applying for graduate programs in the humanities. The first is quite basic: dig deep and make sure that a Ph.D. in your discipline is really what you want to do. This might sound obvious, but feeling energized and excited by your field of study is incredibly important and, considering the immense workload and stress that you will face for the next 5–7 years, will sometimes be the one thing that holds you steady on the path towards graduation.

Second, seek out graduate programs where there are multiple faculty with whom you would like to work rather than just one faculty member. Having this deep bench will make getting through coursework much more meaningful and enjoyable; in later stages, you will have to select additional members for your exam and dissertation committees, so having a team composed of other supportive mentors in your department and affiliated programs will be crucial for your success. Furthermore, so much can change in the long course of a doctoral program, so giving yourself the option of working with multiple people in your department can provide a safety net if, for example, your intended advisor retires before you are finished.

Third, research what recent alumni of each program have done since graduating. If you are thinking of pursuing an alt-ac path, but all the former graduate students in a particular program are leading more traditional careers, it might not be the best fit for you. Usually a department’s website will feature alumni or news sections where you can learn about their post-doctoral lives. You might even be able to reach out to former students and ask about their experiences in the program.  — Didem Uca, Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Colgate University


On funding:

Look at the pay rate for TAs and GAs and determine if you’d be able to survive in that area on a certain salary. I was awarded a presidential fellowship from one university I really wanted to attend—but cost of living was so high in that city that the award didn’t even cover half of my living expenses. Meanwhile, another university offered me a regular TAship in a more rural area, and it turned out that the TAship paid twice what the presidential fellowship offered. So while the presidential fellowship sounded nicer and excited me at first, I made the pragmatic decision to take the TAship at the more rural university. Now that I’ve graduated, I’m really glad I did. Really dig into the numbers to see if it even makes sense to apply to a university before you decide where to send your applications.

On your academic experience:

I’ve always been of the belief that graduate school is what you make of it. Attending the most prestigious program does not guarantee you learn more or get a job. That’s on you. So choose a place where you can envision yourself doing your best work. For me, that meant attending a program closer to home. But I knew that about myself, and I was a well-supported, happy grad student with a sense of work-life balance as a result. I got to help my sister plan her wedding and attend my little brother’s track meets on the weekends. I’d have been so unhappy if I hadn’t been able to do all that. Maybe there’s a city you’ve always wanted to live in, or a place that seems just idyllic to you. Pursue universities that genuinely excite you in locations where you’d be happy to live. This is 5-7 years of your life, after all.

On job training:

Look for programs that offer you strong opportunities to teach and to get involved with a few aspects of university work while you are a graduate student, regardless of your field of study. I was grateful that, during my time at both universities where I pursued graduate work, I had the chance to work on a GAship at a writing center, in student affairs, with summer high school programs, and with a fellowships office in addition to getting the traditional time to teach. The truth is that the job market is very challenging no matter what your field of study is, and it’s probably not a good idea to try to choose a field, sub-speciality, or even university based on whether or not you think you can break through in the job market. Instead, look for the place where you can get the most diverse work experiences so that you build skills that extend beyond research and teaching to open a wide range of university-related careers to you. Professor is not the only university role that provides job satisfaction, personal fulfillment, or the ability to support students. You might be surprised at how much you might like certain jobs on campus! And it’s been my experience that, especially at offices that don’t typically have a lot of graduate student engagement, staff are eager to support graduate students who want to explore career opportunities across campus.  — Kristina Reardon, Associate Director of the Center for Writing at the College of the Holy Cross


First off, I’d like to echo some of the advice provided by my colleagues in this piece: make sure this is what you want to do with the next 5-7 years of your life, figure out if the financial situation of income/location of school works out for you, and pick the schools that have the most faculty in your field.

Being an international student (Canadian doing a PhD in the US), I will offer a few tips for international students considering a PhD in the US. First, makes sure to start the required immigration paperwork ahead of time. Bureaucracy can be slow and daunting and the last thing you want is to show up a few days late to your PhD in a foreign country. Second, research and consider the political climate in the area of your school. While most times college towns are welcoming to foreigners, it is always a good idea to know what to expect from the city off-campus. A good way to do this is to reach out to your potential advisor and current graduate students at your institution to find out how welcoming the town might be. Third, ensuring that your potential school has a good International Student support system can go a long way. These offices are of great assistance with several obstacles that are particular to the international student experience. One of the activities I enjoyed the most upon my arrival at the University of Kansas was the international student orientation, where we were able to interact with peers across the disciplines in the same situation. International Student services might also provide advice on immigration status to ensure that students remain in legal status throughout their academic program according to enrollment requirements of their visa.  — Andrés Rabinovich, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas


Expect (and prepare) to spend a lot of time writing and revising the Statement of Purpose, as this is a crucial part of the application for PhD programs and sets the tone for how you and your application comes across. This is time well-spent, as it’s your chance to share your academic interests, tell your story, explain in your own voice what you want or plan to do in graduate school, and share your project ideas. You are not setting your dissertation topic in stone by identifying your interests and questions in the Statement but you are showing the broader areas or questions that your interests—which are evolving, and will continue to evolve during graduate studies—fall into and how or why you came to them.

Try to see the Statement of Purpose as a way to define, integrate and focus your application. Be forthright in your interests and your project ideas—it is one of the few places in the application where you get to “speak” directly to your readers. And make sure to get feedback well before you submit it. Ask professors—who know your work, who you have taken classes from, or who have advised you. Professors will have the best insight into how to improve your Statement of Purpose, so implement their suggestions!

Finally, prepare for the possibility that it may take more than one round of applications to be admitted into the program of your choice, or into the one that suits your circumstances. This happened to me. The first time that I had applied to PhD programs, I secured one admittance—and while it was to a British university of my choice, the admittance came with no guaranteed funding and only the prospect of applying for funding in future years. I decided to apply again the following year to try once more into different funded programs, rather than to pursue a degree without knowing how/if the funding would pan out year after year. It was during the second application round that I found the program where I am completing my PhD degree. Shoring up your patience for the application process will help you get through these kinds of high’s and low’s.  — Amir Hussain, PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Emory University


1. Start having a backup plan for your post-PhD life, including the possibility of not working in the academy, as you are applying. Start putting it in practice the first year. The job market might turn around – anything is possible – but the current slump is ten years along and still getting worse. Even well-intentioned faculty advisors may have little experience with, or interest in, professional sectors outside the academy. Your experience in graduate school can be enriched by getting to know people who do public-facing scholarship, serve on nonprofit boards, and otherwise have experience that can help you prepare for work beyond the academy.

2. If a program lacks a piece of infrastructure you think it needs, you can create that infrastructure. If no one is talking about how to prepare for non-academic jobs, and you want to know more about that, convene a working group on the topic. If a department’s guest speakers don’t represent the discourses taking place among graduate students, graduate students can start a speaker series that does. (This helps you stand out in the department, and signals to potential employers, down the road, that you are an active and engaged colleague.) Some departments have designated funding for such purposes.

3. You can do it with a family. Yes, even with children. It’s extra work, and you will probably need to take any extra paid work that comes your way. But having obligatory commitments outside of your department can be a helpful reality check. Whether you have a family or not, having meaningful things to do outside of teaching and lit crit – and, as much as you will hopefully grow close with your cohort, with people who are not in graduate school – will keep you grounded.  — Gerard Holmes, PhD candidate in English at the University of Maryland

One Thing I Learned at MLA 2019

Committee members share a few takeaways from MLA 2019, Chicago:

“This was my third MLA. I presented in Austin in 2016, attended the New York conference in 2018, and presented twice–oddly enough, in back to back panels!–this year in Chicago. I’ve presented on panels and coordinated panels at MLA, and one of the presenters in one of my panels this year suggested we all meet for coffee or lunch the day before to coordinate. This was so helpful to me. I got to meet the folks I was presenting with, and I felt more comfortable the day of. We were also able to coordinate our talks in advance. That meant we minimized overlap and found authentic transitions between talks to make them seem linked. I think this made our panel feel more cohesive. Not all panels can do this, I know, but if you are placed on a panel, I’d highly recommend suggesting a quick coffee meet up beforehand. It could be 20 minutes in the hotel lobby; it’s amazing what a few minutes and a few friendly hellos can do for your confidence and organization.”    — Kristina Reardon

“MLA 2019 in Chicago was my second MLA, and it felt like it too. Last year’s MLA in New York was my first and it was certainly overwhelming, though I was neither interviewing nor presenting. The sheer amount of people in one place and the fast pace of the in-between panel walks can be disconcerting the first time around. I parked myself in the Graduate Student Lounge for the most part and limited myself to only attending 2 panels throughout the whole conference. This year in Chicago, however, I knew what to expect and planned accordingly. I picked out in advance the panels I wanted to attend, and I tried to schedule meetings with former colleagues in such a way that I was able to do everything I wanted. Having gone through my first MLA last year made this year’s so much better and easier to navigate. If at all possible, I highly recommend attending an MLA before you have to present or interview. Getting the major conference jitters out of the way ahead of time might just pay off in an unexpected way. ”    — Andrés N. Rabinovich

“One thing I learned at the MLA Conference this year is the importance (and pleasure!) of meeting other scholars at the conference. By attending different events, going to panels, and talking to people in the exhibit hall and in the grad lounge, I was able to meet a number of graduate students, professors, publishers, and other conference attendees with whom I had some fascinating and enlightening conversations. For example, I learned some great tips about applying to jobs from a first-year assistant professor, and I talked with another group of scholars about ways to incorporate our research interests into our classrooms. I appreciated the opportunity to learn from others, get advice about my research and career, and generally just make some new friends and connections! For future conferences, I plan to bring cards with my information on them to hand out to others, as several individuals had them, and they seem like a great way to share contact info without having to awkwardly take out my phone or search for a notebook and pen to write things down. I also noticed that some of the booths in the exhibit hall had contests where you could enter your card and win something, so it wouldn’t hurt to be able to enter those!”        — Kayla Forrest

“One of the things I noticed immediately when looking through the program of this year’s MLA Conference is the astonishing diversity and scope of the sessions. The sessions cover a huge range of topics, methods, issues and perspectives of the humanities. I think one of the rewarding challenges of being a young scholar in the contemporary humanities is exemplified in the conference: there is an astonishing breadth of work being done! One can be both overwhelmed and stimulated as one selects which panels, workshops and events to attend. I found helpful practical sessions on academic writing and navigating the difficult terrain of journal submissions, as well as sessions related to my research interests. One thing that was particularly helpful as I navigated the intensity and size of my first convention, was attending an evening event hosted by my university that made me feel a familiar sense of “home” in a new place.”   — Amir Hussain

“After going to about ten MLAs—enough that this was my third MLA Chicago!—I’m starting to learn that as the committee meetings and coffee chats and book parties pile up I absolutely have to save a little bit of time for myself. I love conferences and seeing friends, but I’m getting too old to work, network, and spend time with people I really want to meet or to catch up with from brunch through late-night drinks for days on end!  (I almost always come home from the MLA with a cold, and the reasons for it are obvious). So hopefully next time I’ll remember that I’ll have a much better time if I leave a little bit of time for myself. If I don’t do all the things I want to do, there’s always next year. And this level of conference over-intensity is just one more manifestation of the compulsion to try to do it all, which I think most of us are always fighting. Being selective is always better than saying yes to everything—at least in the long run.”     — Meredith Farmer

Precarity and Activism: A CSGSP Roundtable at #MLA18

In one of our three sponsored roundtables at #MLA18 we focus on precarity and activism for graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty.  We ask, how do graduate students engage activism from the position of precarity? How do these issues impact research and teaching? Issues include confronting rape culture, creating space for junior scholars in academic organizations, fighting for academic freedom in teaching, critiquing faculty and the corporate university, addressing poverty, and discussing different aspects of union-organizing.

See below for titles, abstracts, speaker bios, and further resources.

Time: Friday January 5 1:45 PM-3:00 PM

Location: Concourse F (Hilton)

Session 342. Chosen as one of the sessions under this year’s theme #StatesofInsecurity

Speakers

Melissa Leigh Antonucci (U of Oklahoma)

Making Room for Junior Scholars

At the 2013 biennial conference for the Society of Early Americanists (SEA), the incoming President Kristina Bross (Purdue University) and Vice President Laura Stevens (University of Tulsa), who later served as president, expressed interest in the possible formation of a junior scholars’ caucus during an early morning breakfast meeting of graduate students. The onus, however, of bringing such an organization into being was on us—the graduate students. Three years and two biennial meetings later, the official Junior Scholars’ Caucus made its debut as a functioning organization within SEA. During those three years, Kirsten Iden (Auburn University) and I worked closely with Kristina, Laura, and others within SEA to carve a space for junior scholars within the larger national organization. This presentation will outline the challenges we faced and the support we received from the SEA executive board in developing an optimal space for junior scholars to share research, fellowship/grant information, job market resources, and ways to create a sense of sustained community among younger scholars. This presentation will also include a discussion of those foundational issues with which junior scholars must contend when considering organizing similar associations—issues such as the degree and scope of national leadership involvement; protocols for communicating with the executive board and caucus members; caucus governance and the creation of a constitution; membership; events coordination; and funding. Finally, I hope this presentation will foster discussions as to how junior scholars, many of whom, even after earning their PhDs, find themselves in positions of precarity, can begin establishing professional and steadfast presences within national organizations that do not always address specific concerns of younger scholars.

Melissa Antonucci is a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma. She earned her PhD at the University of Tulsa in 2015, where she also recently completed a one-year postdoctoral appointment. As a graduate student, Melissa served as co-chair of the Graduate Student Caucus for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and is co-founder of the Junior Scholars’ Caucus for the Society of Early Americanists (SEA), which officially launched in March 2017. Her discussion today focuses mostly on those experiences of laying the groundwork for the Junior Scholars’ Caucus and the challenges and benefits of advocating for graduate students within national organizations.
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Michaela Brangan (Cornell U)

We Are Workers (?): Organizing Graduate Assistants in the American Labor Movement

It is an organizing commonplace, and paradox, that the worse off the worker is, the harder it can be for them to step toward their union. What, then, when the graduate assistant does not see herself as a worker? What, too, about the grad member of an underrepresented, marginalized or oppressed class. How can they know that anything will improve with unionization: a historically majoritarian model of gaining power? This paper gives a brief political and legal analysis of the graduate unionization movement. Specifically with reference to the author’s organizing experience at Cornell University, it thinks through the intersectional and class conflicts that arise with traditional organizing; discusses issues around American business unionism; interrogates the double precarity of “student labor” within the administrative university context; and speculates on what productive solidarity and activism could look like in future academe.

Relevant links:

 
Michaela Brangan, a PhD candidate in the English department at Cornell University, researches and teaches at the intersection of law, politics, and contemporary literature. From 2014 to 2017, she worked to gain recognition and collective bargaining rights for graduate assistants at Cornell with Cornell Graduate Students United (CGSU). She holds degrees from the University of Washington and the Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law.
Update: unable to attend
 
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Alyson Brickey (U of Winnipeg)

Aesthetics in the Adjunct Age

Is philosophical labour commensurable with exploitative labour? In his influential 1950 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Martin Heidegger focuses on a painting of a worn pair of farmer’s shoes by Vincent van Gogh. “A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more,” he says, and then pauses to add: “And yet.” Thinking further, the philosopher decides that “the toil of the worker’s tread stares forth” from the shoes, and argues that the painting is thus “pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread.” With his continuation of this “and yet,” Heidegger mobilizes the material reality of poverty in the service of philosophical explication; in doing so, however, he renders his peasant woman silent: “uncomplaining.” In the contemporary academic condition, performing the work of aesthetic philosophy often means also having to worry as to the certainty of bread, and increasingly, many of us are refusing to remain silent. The corporatized university and its dependence upon precarious labour is what Kevin Birmingham calls “the great shame of our profession,” and adjunct professors who make poverty wages tell of having to “sell their plasma on Tuesdays and Thursdays” to pay for their children’s daycare (Birmingham). “We tell our students to study literature because it will make them better human beings,” Birmingham argues; “that in our classrooms they will learn empathy and wisdom, thoughtfulness and understanding. And yet the institutions supporting literary criticism are callous and morally incoherent” (emph. added). What is the relationship, I ask, between Heidegger’s and Birmingham’s “and yet”? In this labour climate, what kinds of work are we being asked to perform in order to get to a place where we can perform intellectual work, and how do we reconcile this moral incoherence?

Related resources:

Kevin Birmingham’s Truman Capote Award Acceptance Speech: http://www.kevinbirmingham.net/research/

Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”: http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/filmphilology/heideggerworkofart.pdf

Alyson Brickey is a Sessional Instructor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg and University of Manitoba, Canada. She writes about the aesthetics of listing in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literature, and her work has appeared in intervalla and Mosaic. She is currently at work on a book-length project called The Agony of the Partition, which focuses on the recurring figure of the wall in modernist American short fiction by women. Twitter handle: @alybrickey

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David Puthoff (U of New Mexico, Albuquerque)

Beyond Bargaining: Uses and Limits of the Modern Language Association’s Academic Collective Bargaining for Radical Organizers

Following the victory of Columbia University graduate instructors at the National Labor Relations Board in August 2016, the Modern Language Association promoted to members its 2006 collection of essays in collaboration with the American Association of University professors, entitled Academic Collective Bargaining. Perusing this book helped convince organizers at the University of New Mexico that organizing graduate students and adjuncts within traditional unions would be insufficient for our urgent needs in a new political landscape. Instead, organizers sought and found an alternative in an anti-capitalist union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). This paper seeks to chart those conditions altering the struggle for precarious academic labor. These conditions affect our students as well as our teaching and include mass deportation, violence against women on and off university campuses, police violence, Islamophobia, climate change denial, and anti-intellectualism. As educators, we need to recognize these conditions are not new developments stemming from a recent change in federal administration. I argue that instead they are the conditions which the organization of our labor has failed to adequately address before and since the publication of Academic Collective Bargaining. However, we have increasing opportunities now to engage in solidarity work with student groups and community activists as Foucauldian “specific” intellectuals. Coalitions will improve our working conditions beyond the relatively modest stakes set forth in the MLA’s collection, while our organized labor translates into real gains for our students and our communities.

David Puthoff is a graduate instructor and a PhD student in American Literature. His research focuses on the practices of collective identity in the 19th century, including slave rebellions, non-nuclear family configurations, and labor unions.   In his spare time, David networks with student activists on dismantling rape culture, fighting white supremacy, and deploying effective demonstration techniques. He lives in Albuquerque with his partner and their three cats.

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Leland Tabares (Penn State U, University Park)
The Precarious State of Academic Freedom for Graduate Student Instructors in the Trump Era

This paper examines the precarious state of academic freedom for graduate student instructors in the Trump Era. As English departments continue to rely on contingent labor, graduate students increasingly occupy that influential position behind the lectern. But university structures make addressing race in the classroom difficult. Graduate student instructors have little to no institutional protection. With tenured professors already coming under fire for discussing racial politics in the classroom, especially as neoconservative watchdogs like Turning Point USA encourage students to surveil university classrooms through anti-left websites like “Professor Watchlist,” graduate instructors are often left on their own to speak on sensitive issues regarding race—even in courses dedicated to unpacking racial violence—making teaching a daunting task. However, while some of the dangers of the Trump Era lie in its pervasive bigotry and anti-intellectualism, I also suggest that the structures that govern graduate student professionalization in the academy risk enculturating self-censorship, silence, and even fear in graduate student instructors as they attempt to test the political worldviews of their students. I use my own experiences teaching an Asian American Literature course in Spring 2017—currently my home institution’s only course singularly focused on Asian Americanness in any capacity—in rural Pennsylvania to interrogate the institutional conditions that impact graduate students. Asian American Studies holds a particular relevance to discourses on academic freedom because the contemporary political climate is fueled by anti-immigrant sentiments, yellow peril ideologies, and orientalist conceptions of Asians and Asian Americans. I reflect on my time teaching units on Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, Indian immigration, and post-9/11 Muslim American surveillance programs during the first full semester after the election of Donald Trump, and consider how these units coincidentally overlapped with the inauguration of Trump, attacks against Asian Americans, and the signing of Executive Order 13769. In the end, I put forth some useful initiatives that universities can take to support their graduate student labor forces.

Leland Tabares is a PhD candidate in English at Penn State. His research focuses on contemporary Asian American literature and culture, with interests in neoliberalism, institutionality, and professional labor economies. Leland has served as the managing editor for Verge: Studies in Global Asias (published by the University of Minnesota Press), a journal in Asian and Asian American Studies, which was recently named the Best New Journal by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. He currently serves as the Student Representative of the Executive Board for the Association of Asian American Studies. His work has appeared inLateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.

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Anna Waymack (Cornell U)

“Peers Now”: Pitting the Corporate University against Professorial Fictions

While faculty share many concerns about the corporatization of the university with graduate students, there is a marked—and unnoticed—exception. The touted alternative and precursor to the corporate university, shared governance, masks and often reinforces rather than negates power disparities between faculty and graduate students. The polite fiction then becomes one of equal footing: shared governance, shared intellectual exchange, shared responsibilities as scholars and educators in the field. But even this shared governance is inevitably conditional. Faculty have tenure, compensation (to some extent), and inertia. Graduate students take on further vulnerability and a pressure towards silence. It is at least in part self-sabotage to demonstrate for the faculty senate or one’s committee members (groups that can easily overlap) that they are incorrect in perceiving one as a peer.

Yet they are. Faculty who endorse this fiction of equality, no matter how sincerely, absolve themselves of accountability, responsibility, and power. We have a genuine and vast disparity in faculty and graduate student perceptions of power, one which becomes a minefield in, for example, the context of romantic and sexual relationships. Graduate students face this power disparity in gatekeeping, recommendations, reviews, lab access (outside the MLA’s scope), limited alternatives for their chosen studies, and reputational consequences, all of which impinge on free consent.  I will expose the problems of this dynamic in a specific case, the Cornell Faculty Senate’s rejection of a more stringent supervisor/supervisee relationship policy on the grounds of respecting graduate students’ agency and its subsequent denial of the representative graduate assembly’s formal request for that more stringent policy. Through this I hope to show that in select instances the reviled top-down corporate decisions and corporate culture can, counter-intuitively, be enlisted to mitigate graduate student precarity and aid safety, educational access and diversity.

Anna Fore Waymack is a Ph.D. candidate in Medieval Studies at Cornell. Her dissertation investigates the construction of old age and its relationship to futurity in late Middle English writing. She is also coauthoring Insider Information: The Worlds of Medieval Identities, a book on mnemonic practice, the Global Middle Ages, and textual maps. As a Title IX activist, member of the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, and executive vice chair of Cornell’s University Assembly, Anna’s service work focuses on access in higher ed. At times her service work and research meld, resulting in a just-published article on Chaucer’s rape allegations at Medieval Feminist Forum and related digital humanities project chaumpaigne.org. Twitter handle: @annawaymack
Unable to attend: Tara Forbes (Wayne State U); Lucia Lorenzi (McMaster U)
Presiding
Christine Yao (U of British Columbia) 
Christine (Xine) Yao now a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia and later in 2018 will join the English department at University College London as Lecturer. She completed her PhD at Cornell University in 2016. She is currently working on her book manuscript Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America. Her second SSHRC-grant-funded book project is Sex Without Love: Affect, Bodies, and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Sex Work Narratives. She has published or has work forthcoming in J19: Journal of 19th-Century Americanists, Occasion: Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal, Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life, and American Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Twitter handle: @yao_christine

Can’t “Cure” Imposter Syndrome? Reframe It Instead [Guest Post by Melissa Phruksachart]

Guest post by Melissa Phruksachart (NYU). Have an idea for a piece about the graduate student experience? Get in touch — we are on the lookout for contributors!

“It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” –Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, 26)

In what follows, I share three different ways to reframe imposter syndrome, which I define as “a pervasive feeling of self-doubt, insecurity, or fraudulence despite often overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” per psychologist Ellen Hendriksen. My hope is that by finding more ways to think and talk about imposter syndrome, we lessen the shame, blame, and stigma that surround it, in order to find collective ways to manage (if not “cure”) it.                                                                        

  1. IMPOSTER SYNDROME IS AN IRRATIONAL RESPONSE.

Much of the popular literature on imposter syndrome treats it as an affliction of the minoritized – as a pathological and psychological disorder that minoritized subjects cannot get over. In some ways, this is a documented phenomenon. According to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the less competent you are, the less aware you are of that incompetency. In other words, smart people know what they don’t know; they have self-awareness. This is, unsurprisingly, a gendered and racialized affect. In a study entitled “Gender Gaps in Overestimation of Math Performance,” researchers found that men consistently overestimated their performances on math tests, while women were more likely to accurately predict their scores (h/t Chris Matyszczyk). Another set of studies showed that doctoral students in underrepresented minority ethnic groups and women were less likely to submit research for publication than their non-underrepresented male classmates.

Dr. Koritha Mitchell has referred to this phenomenon as “white mediocrity.” In the context of the extrajudicial killings of black people by white police officers, Mitchell notes that the low standard to which white people are held is literally killing black people. (The proof of how far mediocrity can succeed is none other than our President, Donald Trump…)

Academic job consultant Dr. Karen Kelsky has noticed this phenomenon in junior scholars too. I usually take Kelsky’s advice with a huge grain of salt, but I thought her blog post “Women Fail, But Men Bomb,” was spot on. When asked if there were any differences between male and female job candidates, she replied (and I believe this is worth quoting at length):

“The bad job talks by women candidates were run-of-the-mill bad—They were dull, or poorly organized, or unoriginal, or unconvincing, or sadly presented. But the bad job talks by male candidates? Well, those talks could be spectacularly bad. […] These male candidates had somehow managed to completely and totally fail to grasp the spectacular inappropriateness of their topics, their preparedness, and/or presentation styles. They had, apparently, blithely ignored any of the cautions or admonitions that they undoubtedly received from advisors, peers, and general well-wishers, and they proceeded with blissful abandon past the looks of shock, dismay, and outrage gathering on the faces of their job talk audiences. I never saw a woman candidate bomb a job talk in this way. Obviously, this is the flip side of male privilege. Women are not given the license to fail big because they aren’t given the license to try big. Women are disciplined (and punished) and circumscribed and admonished and chastised at so many levels, in so many ways, that men are not….that in the end it is by and large only males who have the opportunity to burst out onto the job market with wildly inappropriate egos and presentation habits intact. This is not to say that all men do. […] But the chances are higher, far higher, that a man may slip through the cracks of the graduate school socializing apparatus, meant to beat graduate students into a state of deference and submission and hyper-self-criticism, and emerge entirely unaware of the impression that he is making on his audience.”

After I read this I began to really pay attention to the way this manifested in my academic life – from male students who repeatedly ignored my advice, to male colleagues who took credit for my organizational labor, and so on. It creates more labor for me – yet one more thing to keep an eye on – but I think I sleep better.

If you want to think about imposter syndrome in this context – as an irrational response to your own unrecognized competence despite all evidence to the contrary, one solution is to begin to build that evidence for yourself. What have you accomplished? Keep a separate document for things that may not make it onto your CV, a running log of all the ways in which you are contributing to the profession – like informally mentoring a new doctoral student, having coffee with someone at a conference, or even attending a talk. All of this is evidence of your presence and participation in the field. At the end of the semester or academic year, review your list and highlight what you’ve accomplished – where you’ve grown, what you struggled through, what you did too much or too little of, and what you’re looking forward to. You can also embrace the negative to lessen the blow: One colleague keeps a list of every academic rejection she receives. Every fifth time, she treats herself.  

  1. IMPOSTER SYNDROME IS A RATIONAL RESPONSE.

A second response to imposter syndrome rejects the suggestion to “lean in” or lifehack our way out of it. Another school of thought suggests that imposter syndrome is a perfectly rational response to a plethora of clues, both structural and those that manifest as microaggressions, that tell you that your work is not valued – whether because you are a measly graduate student, or because you work in a minoritized field, or because your scholarship needs more work, or all three. Cate Huston notes that, “The focus on imposter syndrome as a personal problem, as a series of ‘irrational’ beliefs, pathologizes its victims and diverts attention from the problematic environment to the individual: this is classic victim blaming.”

On an individual level, graduate students or anyone experiencing imposter syndrome should try to become more attuned to the ways in which legitimacy is performed in the academy in ways that index race, class, gender, ability, appearance, and many more.

On an institutional level, departments, faculty, and students can create more spaces for student-led low-stakes scholarly activity. In 2012, my graduate school colleagues and I, together with our faculty mentor Kandice Chuh, started the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color Project for graduate students in the New York City area. Its goal was to create an interdisciplinary intellectual community as well as a support system of intergenerational colleagues. Our principal activity was a lunch and lecture series with scholars of color from area institutions. Over lunch, scholars spoke to us, often quite candidly, of their experiences of struggle and survival in the academy. This was followed by a public lecture on their recent work in order to emphasize the importance of understanding “diversity” not only in terms of bodies, but more importantly as an epistemological project. Alongside this model of vertical mentoring, we benefited greatly through horizontal peer mentoring. We discovered that we could create space for critical discourse in the academy not only through an academic field, but also through the feminist formation of social communities and the knowledges produced therein. By making this space for minoritized students, we created a community that hadn’t formally existed before. Through this experiment, we learned how scholarly work does not happen in a vacuum, despite the way in which we’re taught to go about our work.

  1. LAST BUT NOT LEAST: BEING AN IMPOSTER IS AWESOME.

This last reframing is more fun. Rather than trying to convince yourself that you are not an imposter, Beth McMillan suggests that it is far less work to embrace your position as an imposter. She asks, “If you were a spy who had somehow managed to get right into the heart of the enemy’s regime, would you waste time feeling guilty about tricking your way in there, or would you get on with the business of leaking nuclear secrets, taking photos with tiny cameras and poisoning the soup of important diplomats?” So, if you indeed are an imposter, own it. Steal away with what you can, and enjoy your life.

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These remarks are adapted from those I gave at a roundtable, “Experiences Navigating Impostor Syndrome and Inequity in the Academy,” organized by the Minority Scholars’ Committee of the American Studies Association for the ASA annual meeting in Chicago, IL, on November 10, 2017.

Melissa Phruksachart is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU, where she teaches television history, Asian American media, and minority discourse. She received her PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2016. You can find her on Twitter at @mphruksachart.