[Ryan Calabretta-Sajder]

MLA 2025 Convention

MLA Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Profession

Session 413: Navigating the Academy: A Mentoring Session

 

NB: Session Information Follows. The mentoring session will continue informally following the roundtable via happy hour. Location: Ernst Café (600 S. Peters St.; across the street from the Hilton Riverside)

 

Description:

This session is dedicated to mentoring graduate students and early faculty members to better navigate the academy. Scholar-mentors discuss diverse topics in 10–15-minute slots simultaneously, and participants move around the room and network with the topics and mentors of their choice. Mentors provide advice aimed at graduate students, women, queer-identifying faculty members, contingent faculty members, and Black, Latinx, and Asian faculty members.

 

Presider: Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

 

Speakers/Mentors:

• Debra Rae Cohen, U of South Carolina, Columbia, “Early Career Publishing: Tips from a Journal Editor”
• Luis Fernando Restrepo, U of Arkansas, Fayetteville; “360 Engaged Scholarship: Scholars at Work in the Classroom, University, Profession, and Community”

 

Abstract: How much our work matters to us, our students, our university, profession and community is not reducible to so called smart metrics and other quantifications—although these quantitative measures might be instrumental, they should not be an end. So, although service is often seen as a burden, and graduate students and junior faculty are advised to minimize commitments beyond teaching and research, my experience has been that it is fundamental in developing a successful and rewarding career.  What is not strictly listed in your job description may be the most meaningful work you will ever do.

 

• Colleen M. Ryan, Tufts U, “Values in the Workplace? Roles, Responsibilities, and Expectations”

 

Abstract: I plan to talk about values and value added propositions.

What are values that we each bring to our work and seek in our workplaces? What is our personal value added proposition?  We will discuss how to work toward self-discovery and alignment.

 

• Kate Schnur, Queens C, CUNY, “How To Be Okay with Feeling Like a Failure: Finding Community in Contingency”
• William James Spurlin, Brunel U London, “Critical Leadership: New Directions in Mentoring and Care in the (Il)Liberal Academy”

 

Abstract: This mentor will focus on mentoring practices on the institutional context of the contemporary academy with threats against shared governance, free inquiry, etc and what the issues are for critical leadership in HE, and how queer scholarship in particular influences my own mentoring practices, which has implications not only for queer-identified early-career faculty, but has intersections for early-career women in the profession, those marked by racial differences, and contingent faculty.

 

 

Presenters’ Bios:

Debra Rae Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at the University of South Carolina. The former editor of Modernism/modernity, and current Past President of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, she has also edited two collections and several special journal issues. She publishes on modernism and media, especially the BBC, and on women’s literary responses to war and political crisis.

 

Luis Fernando Restrepo is university professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has served as director of the Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies program, Assistant Vice chancellor for Diversity, and founder of several initiatives such as La Oficina Latina, The Latino Alumni Society, and The Biliteracy Project.  His areas or specialization are colonial Latin America and literature and human rights, with five books and editions and over 50 articles and chapters published. He has been visiting professor at the Universidad de Antioquia, Eafit, Atlántico, Buenos Aires and Javeriana.  Currently he serves as the campus co-chair of the Scholars at Risk Network and is the president of the Association of Departments and Programs of Comparative Literature. He was appointed by the Governor to serve in the Arkansas Commission on Closing the Academic Achievement Gap and later was involved in the passing of legislation to allow bilingual education in an English Only state.

 

Colleen Ryan, associate vice provost in the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty & Academic Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB), has been named vice provost for faculty at Tufts. Ryan currently holds the rank of professor of Italian in the Department of French and Italian at IUB, is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Gender Studies, and was the director of undergraduate studies for Italian from 2015-2023. Her areas of expertise include Italian cinema and literature, gender and sexuality studies, curriculum development for foreign languages, and Italian American/Italian diaspora studies. She has received multiple teaching awards, published widely across her various research interests, and held numerous leadership roles in service to her university and the profession. At Tufts, she is a tenured faculty appointment in the Department of Romance Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences.

 

Kate Schnur is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the departments of English at CUNY Queens College. She also serves as the contingent faculty representative to the board of the Modernist Studies Association, and in that role runs the MSA’s Caucus for Contingent and Independent Scholars, which devotes itself to programming that makes the visible to lives and work of scholars off the tenure track. Her research focuses on how modernism draws upon contemporaneous medical theories of reproduction, gender, and sexuality. Her work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Electric Literature, Medical Humanities and The William Carlos Williams Review. 

 

William J Spurlin is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Brunel University, University of London.  As Vice-Dean in the College of Arts & Social Sciences (2017-2022), he mentored and developed a mentoring program for early-career faculty. Widely known for his work in queer theory, postcolonial studies, African studies, and queer translation studies, Professor Spurlin’s most recent book is Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb (2022).  He has recently published chapters/articles on queer migration in the Routledge Companion to Migration Literature (2025) and on feminist/queer translation in the Journal of Feminist Scholarship.  For the contribution of his research in queer studies to social science research, he was named Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Britain (2017) and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK (2016) for distinguished leadership in teaching and learning.

 

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