GATEWAY STUDY OF
LEADERSHIP
TURNING
POINTS
SCHOOL OF
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Choosing Academia
Choosing Academia
Turning Points The Turning Points book series is a product of the School of Social Sciences’ Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL) at Rice University. Each year GSL Fellows conduct interviews with faculty from a different school and feature select excerpts in five areas. The books in Seres IV (2014-2015) are dedicated to the Rice University School of Humanities and are grouped as follows: Choosing Academia Insider Perspectives Teaching & Research Maintaining Inspiration Future of the Humanities Previous Turning Points series: Series I (2011-12)– Rice University School of Social Sciences Series II (2012-2013)– Rice University School of Natural Sciences Series III (2013-2014) - Rice University School of Engineering Copyright 2015 Rice University. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the School of Social Sciences at Rice University. Requests for permission should be directed to ipek@rice.edu.
Rice University School of Social Sciences
Gateway Study of Leadership TURNING POINTS
{series IV | 2014 - 2015} Humanities
Choosing Academia
Gateway School of Social Sciences Rice University 6100 Main Street Houston, Texas 77005-1827 U.S.A.
GATEWAY DIRECTOR
Ipek Martinez GATEWAY ADMINISTRATOR
Alex Wyatt TURNING POINTS DIRECTOR
Mary Charlotte Carroll EDITORS
Amber Lo, Matthew McGee, Sevita Rama COPY EDITOR
Emma Hurt COVER DESIGNER
Cindy Thaung
GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP CO-DIRECTORS
Nitin Agrawal, Cathy Hu, Tanya Rajan GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP SENIOR FELLOWS
Mary Charlotte Carroll, Sai Chilikapati, Giray Ozseker, Andrew Ta GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP FELLOWS
Thomas Bennett, Adam Cleland, Hanna Downing, Bradley Hamilton, Aaron Huang, Elisabeth Kalomeris, Amber Lo, Matthew McGee, Neeti Mehta, Kevin Pang, Sevita Rama, Rebecca Satterfield, Tejaswi Veerati, Bridget Youngs
REFLECTIONS ON: CHOOSING ACADEMIA For the past four years, the Gateway Study of Leadership has acted as a bridge between students and faculty, bringing the essence of professors’ wisdom to those who might benefit the most. This year, the GSL interview team, composed of 21 students from various disciplines, met with more than 50 faculty members from the School of Humanities to learn more about their career journeys and hear their inside perspectives on academia. Highlights from these sessions are printed in this year’s Turning Points series, showcasing themes toward which professors tended to gravitate. The decision to pursue a career in the academic world is a central moment —or turning point—in the lives of most professors. Surprisingly, many humanities faculty felt not that they were certain of their chosen path from childhood, but that they fell into their current lives, almost by accident. While many reported an early passion for the written word and a love of learning, few predicted what life held in store for them. They aimed, quite simply, to be happy. “And the rest,” as Dr. John Boles puts it, “is history.” - Mary Charlotte Carroll, Turning Points Director
CONTENTS
1.
Nicolas Shumway, Ph.D. Ivory Tower
1
2. Peter Caldwell, Ph.D. 3 Call from the FBI 3.
Terrence Doody, Ph.D. The Complete Truth
5
4.
Myounghee Cho, M.A. Whatever Changes Happen
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5.
Maria Cristina Giliberti, Ph.D. In Tune With My Nature
9
6.
Alexander Byrd, Ph.D. How Could I Not Know This?
11
7.
Richard J. Smith, Ph.D. I Got Hooked
13
8. 9. 10.
Christopher Sperandio, M.F.A. Like Breathing
15
David Worth, Ph.D. Strong Parental Influence
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Fay Yarbrough, Ph.D. High Expectations
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11.
JosĂŠ Aranda, Jr., Ph.D. First Generation Family
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12. Deborah Harter, Ph.D. 25 None of the Usual Ways 13.
J. Dennis Huston, Ph.D. Function of Chance
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14.
Maya Soifer Irish, Ph.D. Odds Against Me
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15.
John Boles, Ph.D. Caught Up in the Space Race
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About the Contributors 39 43 Acknowledgements
TURNING POINTS ONE
Ivory Tower Nicolas Shumway, Ph.D. Dean of Humanities and Frances Moody Newman Chair in Humanities, Rice University
I went to university when I was seventeen years old, and I haven’t left. This is my life. Some people say I live in an ivory tower, but I love my ivory tower. Everything, the life of the mind, engaging with intelligent people, teaching students, preserving and passing on tradition, all of these are things that I truly love—universities as the conservators of the past through history, a university that trains musicians and trains engineers—I mean this is a wonderful life. I would not want to do anything else. Now I wouldn’t have minded becoming the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, but I’m really very happy as an academic.
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TURNING POINTS TWO
Call from the FBI Peter Caldwell, Ph.D. Samuel G. McCann Professor of History, Rice University
In eleventh grade, a friend and I did an interview with a bunch of people about a scandal that was occurring in Oklahoma that had to do with county commissioners. We went to the top—we went to the FBI—we talked to everyone we could to get information. Once the principal said, “The FBI has a call for you—what’s going on?” It was an interesting moment. In terms of saying I would go into academia, I don’t remember a single moment where I made the decision. Whether I was going to be employed in the academy or not, my intention has always been, since tenth grade, that I was going to read, I was going to research, and I was going to do things on that level. Even if I had a 40-hour work week as a bank teller, I would still be going to the library and digging up stuff.
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TURNING POINTS THREE
The Complete Truth Terrence Doody, Ph.D. Professor of English, Rice University
I realized that I wanted to be an English teacher when I was fifteen. I had a very inspirational teacher, and his inspiration didn’t work in the normal ways, exactly. He seemed to me to be cultivated or cultured. He had been in a religious order, the Christian Brothers, and he did not have an advanced degree in English. Still, he had a kind of presence in the classroom and a value of the intellectual life that I wasn’t hearing from the usual channels: school, church, parents. He was different. For some reason that made me want to be an English teacher. I’d also always been a serious reader, for no other reasons than I liked to read, from sixth grade on. This became a way of organizing that reading toward some other goal. In retrospect, I think I started reading because, without being able to articulate it, I didn’t quite believe that I was being told the complete truth about human experience. 5
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TURNING POINTS FOUR
Whatever Changes Happen Myounghee Cho, M.A. Senior Lecturer, Center for Lanuages and Intercultural Communication, Rice University
After finishing my undergraduate program in Korea, I worked at an international trading company for almost 15 years, but I changed my career, even though I liked working in my company. When I was young, specifically when I was a middle school student in Korea, I started to learn English and I don’t know why, but I showed some talent in acquiring the language. I did well in my classes, and I loved my teachers—especially English teachers— and they always praised me in class. I developed a dream to become an English teacher. There are some lucky people who find their life goal in their earliest stages, but there are also people who happen to take a round way to get to the final goal. I am of the latter group. Even though I liked working in the trading company, I always felt a void and before getting older, I thought I should try to follow that dream. 7
So, I made a very, very difficult decision to change my career and become an English teacher. Internally, I had the sense that language education is not just word-to-word translation. Even though I wasn’t in the field at the time, I sensed that language reflects culture and the ways that people of the language use and speak. I never thought that I’d become a Korean teacher. Actually, I never did well in Korean in elementary and middle school. But, while taking classes in social linguistics and intercultural aspects in language acquisition, I had a lot of opportunities to look back on my own language—Korean. I happened to search for the status of Korean language in America, especially in American universities and I found that still, just a small number of universities in America had Korean classes. I decided to devote myself to Korean and Korean culture in America, so I taught Korean at my previous university and now here at Rice. From this point, I am committed to improving as a Korean teacher and promoting Korea, its language, and its culture at Rice and in America. Whatever changes happen, I will be a Korean teacher.
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TURNING POINTS FIVE
In Tune With My Nature Maria Cristina Giliberti, Ph.D. Senior Lecturer, Center for Lanuages and Intercultural Communication, Rice University
Initially, I wanted to be a doctor—a completely different field—but then I decided I really liked literature and philosophy. I felt right away, when I was in high school, that it was going to be my field when I started studying Latin and Greek. Rationally I was thinking, well, probably, if I get into medicine, it’s going to be easier to find a job, but I decided I wanted something else. My parents grew up in Italy during fascism and they both came from strong, strict families. They kind of reacted against what their life was, and they were very, very—probably too liberal with us. They never wanted to put any sort of restriction on my brother or me. Their attitude was, “Take your time, do whatever you want to do and doesn’t matter, we’re going to support you in everything.”
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Once I was at university I took foreign languages and literature. I had a chance to meet a professor who asked me to help him with some research. I really liked a project that we did on this Italian playwright who became the main topic of my further studies. My life changed like that, and I studied to become a university professor. I got my Ph.D. in contemporary Italian literature and I really, really liked it because it was so in tune with my nature, with what I like to do. But growing up when I was very young, I didn’t have any idea; it just kind of developed over the course of my studies.
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TURNING POINTS SIX
How Could I Not Know This? Alexander Byrd, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History, Rice University
The things I learned in the history classroom at Rice really confused, baffled, and inspired me. I hope college still does this for people. I learned stuff I just had no idea about. I was like, “How could I be in school twelve years and not know this?” I realized that A) there was so much that the general public didn’t know about Afro-America, and B) I realized that we need people not just to teach folks this, but there was so much unknown. The historian needs to go out and know that stuff. Watching my mentors and teachers do that helped me to want to do that too.
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TURNING POINTS SEVEN
I Got Hooked Richard J. Smith, Ph.D. George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History, Rice University
Nothing at all was expected of me as a youth, except that I would go to college. My parents were both teachers—one elementary, one secondary—and so they wanted me to get a college education. But my aspiration was to be a baseball player. So, when I went to the University of California, Davis, it was to play baseball; it wasn’t to study. But in my junior year, I met a young woman, now my wife, who was interested in Asian culture. She took a course in Chinese history taught by Professor Kwang-Ching Liu, and I thought it would be romantic to enroll in the class with her. I had to do well because she did well, and suddenly I became a student! As it happened, Professor Liu was trying to build a graduate program in Chinese studies at Davis in the shadow of U.C. Berkeley. He was looking for warm 13
bodies, and I guess he saw a glimmer of potential in me. So he said, “If you stay here and go to graduate school, I will give you a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship and we’ll send you down to Stanford for a course in intensive Chinese—two years worth in ten weeks. To cap things off, my baseball career, which had been quite promising during my first three years at Davis, tanked in my senior year, and I didn’t have many prospects. So I went to graduate school in Chinese history, and now I can’t imagine doing anything else. There is something to be said for serendipity. Or perhaps the more accurate term is dumb luck.
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TURNING POINTS EIGHT
Like Breathing Christopher Sperandio, M.F.A. Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing, Rice University
When you love what you do, it is an art. Artists, at least in my experience, do not differentiate between what they do for their artwork and what they do for the rest of their lives. Making art is like breathing. It is not something I ever think about.
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TURNING POINTS NINE
Strong Parental Influence David Worth, Ph.D. Senior Lecturer of Humanities, Rice University
My parents were young so I saw both of them get all their degrees. There were times when I was a little kid and my mom brought me to class. I would actually be sort of in the classroom in the back playing. Her professors were okay with it, so I’d be around the school of education. Then after that when she was a teacher I would be in school before and after waiting on her, just kind of hanging around with other teachers. It’s not surprising that I went into education at the university level since I spent a good chunk of my childhood hanging around the campus of my mom’s school. And the other aspect to that is while my mom was in college, my dad was working. I saw somebody just working a ton of hours at a job that wasn’t intrinsically creative in the way that I might choose to work a ton of hours now. While for him he was working on 17
something for somebody else, so that had a lot to do in forming what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be in an environment where I could be creative with my own time and control my own time via my own schedule. If I need to work 12 hours straight or work through the night and then not work the next day, then I have control over that. Somebody else doesn’t.
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TURNING POINTS TEN
High Expectations Fay Yarbrough, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History, Rice University
I come from a different kind of a household in that my mum is from South Korea, and my dad is African American; he’s from Texas actually. He was in the military, and that’s how he met my mum. So my mum is both an immigrant and also an Asian immigrant so it’s a different kind of experience. My mum is a pretty stereotypically Asian, like the tiger mum from the famous book. The expectations for high academic performance were pretty much there from the very beginning, for both my sibling and me. My mum comes from a pretty impoverished background, but she still had really high expectations as she would say everybody in her little town did. Even though they were all farmers, everybody still really revered teachers and really expected you to perform well in school. So my mum’s expectations were really high that way. My dad has always been really supportive, but he hasn’t quite put the same 19
kind of pressure that my mum puts on us about academic performance. My mum’s goal for her kids was for us to be medical doctors. My brother is a pharmacist and I’m a university professor, but she’s still a bit disappointed that we’re not medical doctors or as she would say “real doctors.” This is still upsetting to her. She still talks about it, even though by many standards we’re children who have done quite well for ourselves, but that’s not how she would read it. She wanted everyone to be a doctor; to her that was a pinnacle of success. It was a big rupture when I announced that I did not want to be a medical doctor. I was a Rice undergraduate, so it was here that I learned I could do other things, I could go to graduate school and become a professor. For my parents that was really different and weird. My father was drafted during the Vietnam War era and didn’t finish college and my mum dropped out of school when she was in high school because she was one of seven kids and they needed her to work, so the whole graduate school thing was really weird to them. They didn’t understand what it was about, they kept 20
saying things like, “You’re going to go to school so long just to be a teacher? Why can’t you be a teacher after you graduate from Rice? What are you doing?” There was a lot of education that had to happen with my parents about what I was doing, and why I was doing it, and what did it mean. Now that they know more about it they’re very pleased with what I do, but it was confusing for them. It was a world that they weren’t familiar with or know much about. Even today, I’ve published a book and edited a collection, and I’m working on another book now and my mum will say, “What’s taking you so long?” And at one point she said, “Why don’t you just type something, just make something up?” I was trying to explain to her that’s the opposite of what I do. I’m a historian; I can’t just make stuff up. When you’re writing nonfiction, and you’re an academic, you expect it to be based on evidence.
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TURNING POINTS ELEVEN
First Generation Family José Aranda, Jr., Ph.D. Associate Professor of English, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Rice University
My parents are from Mexico. They immigrated to Houston in 1960, and I was born just a year later. Part of their overall vision for the family was always based around education and getting the best available education. My family’s story was a somewhat typical first-generation immigrant family narrative, where you want the kids to go to school and become successful doctors and lawyers or business-owners. I was very good at school. I became a classic “scholarship boy.” For a long time I thought I was going to be a doctor and for a short time I thought I was going to be a lawyer. But then I taught high school for a couple of years, and I decided I liked teaching. I understood that I needed to learn more and that I wanted to teach college-age students, so that’s what happened. I did not become a doctor. I did not become a lawyer. I found I had a bit more of a mission, if not joy, in just teaching. 23
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TURNING POINTS TWELVE
None of the Usual Ways Deborah Harter, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Classical and European Studies, Rice University
I had wonderful, wonderful parents who were the original hippies I’m sure. My father was highly educated with a Ph D., and he was a high school teacher. My mother was a nurse. Ours was a big family with six kids. From very early on, the most exciting thing every day was the discussion around the kitchen table. There were also bookshelves everywhere in our home. I think the example of a very rich, cultural intellectual environment was very important. There was absolutely no pressure to achieve anything. In fact, my father used to give us a dollar for every F we got. Because as he said, “when you get an A, that’s a reward in itself. It’s when you get an F that you need a dollar.” My parents really made every effort to talk about school, to encourage our studies because they were exciting and meaningful. 25
I graduated high school as the valedictorian in a class of about 1100. I was offered a full scholarship to Reed College, and my father suggested that maybe it would be more interesting to go to Europe and to go to a different country every summer, learn the language, then go to school for one year there, and then go to another country and learn the language and so on. It was an absolutely crazy plan, but I decided to do that. I went to Europe on a ship with 200 dollars in my pocket, but couldn’t get into university in Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, because they wanted me to do another year of high school and I didn’t want to do that. The last thing my parents were thinking about was achievement in any of the usual ways. I think I have probably benefited from that over time more than from anything else. I ended up playing on the European tennis circuit while I was there, but then injured my knee and had to come home. The one school that I had applied to before I decided to go abroad was UCLA, so I ended up going to UCLA as an anthropology major. But I 26
studied French out of interest and went to Europe to study for a year in France because, in Bordeaux, where they had their study abroad program, was one of the best researchers in the field that I was interested in. So I thought, well, I’ll go on this study abroad program and continue my anthropology there. He turned out to be a not terribly good person to be around, and I decided that I’d better not do any more anthropology at the University of Bordeaux. However, I loved literature. I took French when I came back to UCLA, and I was told that if I took a couple more courses, I’d have a double major in anthropology and French. I did just that, so here I am a professor of French, completely unplanned. Of course I have always loved literature, and when I discovered comparative literature a little bit later it was with a great sense of having discovered what I loved, and French literature was my specialty within that, but was entirely accidental. I was supposed to be an anthropologist.
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TURNING POINTS THIRTEEN
Function of Chance J. Dennis Huston, Ph.D. Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English, Rice University
I entered Wesleyan thinking I was going to be a lawyer. My father was a lawyer and he made a very comfortable living. I thought it sounded interesting and I didn’t mind the money. But the longer I stayed in college the more I realized that I wasn’t sure that was what I really wanted to do, because I was so excited by the study of English literature. The people who taught me English literature seemed much happier than my father, who was always dealing with clients who gave him “difficulties.” But I finally decided when I was a senior that I would at least try law school and see how it went because if I liked it, I figured I could make more money. I’d also read a lot of books about trial lawyers and judges and their lives seemed very interesting to me. So I went to University of Virginia law school and discovered that it wasn’t what I wanted. Classes were spectacular, and I really believe I learned more 29
about teaching in the eight weeks I was in law school than I learned the whole rest of my life before that! I learned just by watching how good the lawyers were when they taught by the Socratic method, but I hated the reading assignments. I was used to reading really interesting novels and poems and plays, so I decided that law was not what I wanted to do. I left law school and took a job teaching eighth grade in a prep school in Florida for the rest of that year, and then I went to Yale for graduate school in English. I went planning to be a Victorian, but I didn’t like the guy who taught the Victorian course I took so I sort of gradually ended up as a jack-of-alltrades who was interested more in the Renaissance than anything else. When I finished at Yale, they asked me to stay and teach there, which I did. I taught some drama, one of the Spencer courses, and a Shakespeare course among other things. I had a friend who had been in one of my courses with me in graduate school who was also asked to teach at Yale, and we spent a lot of time talking together. He and I were both football fans and were also both interested in literature, so we had plenty to talk about. He was a Texan who wanted to head back to Texas, and he took a job at Rice 30
the next year. One day he called me up and said, “We’re looking for a Shakespearian at Rice. Are you interested in coming?” And I said no, and he said, “Why don’t you come anyway just to see what it’s like here.” I said, “Fine, if I come I want you to understand that I’m coming mostly to see you, but I also really want to meet undergraduates; that’s what I care most about. I want to go to some classes and observe.” So I did that while I was here, and they offered me a job. I went back to my advisor who had directed my dissertation and said, “What do you think...this is a very good job offer and is a lot more money than what I’m making at Yale. What do you think I ought to do?” Our lives are such a function of chance. What he said to me was, “If I were you, I would take the job. It’s a very good job, and I think the bottom is going to fall out of the market. For the first time in history, California school systems did not hire all our extra Ph.D.’s and I think the market is going to take a real dive.” And he was right. I thought this would be a very nice place to be, and at the advice of my dissertation director I took the job.
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TURNING POINTS FOURTEEN
Odds Against Me Maya Soifer Irish, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of History, Rice University
I am an immigrant. I was not born in the United States. I came here from the Soviet Union. I was born in Moscow into an academic family. My father was and is a research physicist, he did some important work for the Institute for Atomic Energy, and his dad was also a physicist. They wrote a textbook that was used in middle school. I had to use it in my class, and since I had the same last name, I was expected to do the same thing. Unfortunately, I could not. This was of course a stress at the time, that I couldn’t follow footsteps of my father. My mother on the other hand had an interest in history and philosophy, and although she never got a Ph.D., she had a Master’s degree in philosophy. For me this was not really a choice, but I was interested in history very early on. Although it came naturally to me, I did not really think of it as a career path.
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I read a lot of ancient history as a child in fact. I was a very nerdy child. I was five or six years old and I’d read all the myths of ancient Greece, some of which were not really meant for children. I loved them so much that at five or six years old, I believed in the existence of these gods, because I grew up without religion. My parents were not religious in any way. I read it over and over again, I found it absolutely fascinating. I had this early interest, and looking back I realize I would probably not have become a historian if I had the chance to study ancient languages at early ages, but they did not teach Greek in Soviet schools. I knew I was expected to go to college. I grew up with the idea that a career in academia is the most noble and most wonderful career path you can choose. Almost subconsciously I knew this was what I had to do. But I was bad in natural sciences. Maybe somebody gave me this idea I wasn’t good in math, so, like many girls, I got discouraged. To go into something like history, that would be a dangerous path to take, because history in the Soviet Union was an ideological discipline. You had to 34
approach the history from an ideological perspective, which was of course Marxism-Leninism. My family did not hold very strong communist views at all. My father, in fact, was asked to join the Communist Party and turned them down. My mom was a historian and philosopher, but she was not a member of the Party; this was a problem that would eventually ruin her career. To teach history or philosophy on an advanced level, you had to have this stamp of the Party on your forehead. When I graduated at 16, I decided to become a historian like my mom. However, I failed my necessary history exam. I got an F in the entrance exam of college in history. The reason I got an F is that I did not know what I was “supposed� to say (by this time Gorbachov was in power and the world was changing), and the exam was about Russian history. But look at me now. Eventually though, I came to the United States and despite being a wife and mother was able to pursue my advanced degree in history. I am still amazed by the miracle that it all happened the way it did, despite the odds being heavily against me. 35
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TURNING POINTS FIFTEEN
Caught Up in the Space Race John Boles, Ph.D. William Pettus Hobby Professor of History, Rice University
I was a freshman in high school when Sputnik went up. The national resolve was of a competitive Cold War environment. Everybody who was smart had an obligation to go into science, so that we too could launch missiles and win the Cold War space race. It was just sort of predetermined that I would go into science. Although, I have to say that in my reading and in the classes I had in high school, the classes I liked best were literature and history. I was basically the best student in every subject, and I just thought I could do anything. So, I had actually come to Rice thinking I would be a physics major, because I thought that is how you learn how to launch satellites. But, I had absolutely no science background in my high school. I hadn’t taken calculus, I had no advanced math, I had no laboratory work – I never looked through a microscope or anything. 37
I came to Rice and plunged into physics, chemistry, and calculus my first semester; I quickly realized that my real interest was in history. We had this national obligation to win the space race, but I realized that not only was I behind in those subjects here, I would have to really struggle. In fact, what I really liked best were my classes in history and English. In those days, all the courses were year long classes, whether you liked it or not. I took math, physics, and chemistry, and continued it for the full year. In the next year, I switched to a history major, which is what I can now recognize is what I really liked best all along. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
JosÊ F. Aranda, Jr., Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of English and an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rice University. His research areas and specialties include the study of nineteenth century/contemporary Chino literature and early American literature. Dr. Aranda received his B.A. from Yale University in 1984, his M.A. from Brown University in 1988, and his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1995. John Boles, Ph.D. is the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History at Rice University. His primary research interests are focused on the United States South, with an emphasis on religion, culture, and slavery. Dr. Boles received his B.A. from Rice University in 1965 and his Ph.D from University of Virginia in 1969. Alexander Byrd, Ph.D. has taught at Rice University since 1998, specializing in Afro America with a focus on black life in the Atlantic world and the Jim Crow South. More recently, he has examined the process of school desegregation and neighborhood change in the urban south. He earned his B.A. from Rice University in 1990, later receiving his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2001. He is currently Wiess College Master. Myounghee Cho, M.A. is a Lecturer at the Center for Languages and Intercultural Communication at Rice University. Her research interest lies in second language acquisition of Korean. She focuses on contrastive linguistic relationships between learners’ first languages and Korean, as well as cross-cultural aspects conveyed in languages. She received her M.A. in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) from Northern Arizona University.
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Terrence Doody, Ph.D. is a Professor of English at Rice University and the Director of the Program in Writing and Communication. He has received NEH and Mellon grants as well as several prestigious teaching awards at Rice. He teaches courses in the modernist period, the novel and narrative theory, and contemporary literature, and he is working on a book on the literature of the city. Dr. Doody holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University. Maria Cristina Giliberti, Ph.D. is a Lecturer of Italian Language at Rice University. Her research interests focus on 20th century Italian literature, specifically the early novel and drama. Luigi Pirandello has been the main topic of her studies and publishing. Dr. Giliberti received her Master’s Degree in Foreign Language and Literature and her Doctorate in Italian Studies from the Università degli Studi di Bari in Italy. Deborah Harter, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classical and European Studies in the School of Humanities at Rice University. Dr. Harter received her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1973, her M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980 and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. J. Dennis Huston, Ph.D. is a Professor of English in the Department of English at Rice University. During his time at Rice, he has taught humanities, drama, public speaking, and Shakespeare on Film. He is also the author of the book Shakespeare’s Comedies of Play and the coeditor of a collection of Renaissance plays. Dr. Huston received his Ph.D. from Yale University. Maya Soifer Irish, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of History at Rice University and is the Faculty Affiliate for the Medieval Studies Program and Jewish Studies. Her research interests are focused on the history of interfaith relations in medieval Spain and the Mediterranean. Dr. Irish received her M.A. from the University of Colorado in 2000 and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2007.
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Nicolas Shumway, Ph.D. is the Dean of Humanities at Rice University and holds the Frances Moody Newman Chair in Humanities. His research and scholarship deals with Latin-American history and culture, ideology and politics of foreign-language education, and ideologies of Hispanism. Dr. Shumway received his B.A. from Brigham Young University in 1969 and his M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1976) from the University of California, Los Angeles. Richard J. Smith, Ph.D. is the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities, a Professor of History, a James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy Scholar, and the Director of Asian and Global Outreach in the Center for Education at Rice University. He is also an adjunct professor at the Center for Asian Studies of The University of Texas at Austin and a member of several professional advisory boards. Dr. Smith co-founded the Baker Institute Transnational China Project and served for 15 years as the Director of Asian Studies at Rice. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, in 1972. Christopher Sperandio, M.F.A. is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Rice University. His collaborative artwork explores the numerous margins between mass and museum cultures, taking the form of comic books, television, painted installations, and web sites. He has produced projects for museums and art centers in the US, Germany, Northern Ireland, Denmark, England Scotland, Wales, Spain, and France and with institutions such as MoMA/PS1, London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Fantagraphics Books and DC Comics. Sperandio is the Creator and Executive Producer of ARTSTAR, a reality television series based in the New York art world. He is also a founding member of Kartoon Kings, a media company engaged in the production of comic books, animations and films. Sperandio received his M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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David Worth, Ph.D. is the Director of the George R. Brown Forensics Society at Rice University. He is also a lecturer in the School of Humanities. His area of interest includes critical-cultural studies of communication, rhetorical theory, and the pedagogy of forensics. Dr. Worth received his B.A. and M.A. from Texas Tech University in 1993 and 1995, respectively, and his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2003. Fay Yarbrough, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History at Rice University. Her areas of interest are African American History, American Indian History, and Southern History. Her current research project focuses on the role of Choctaw Indians in the American Civil War. Dr. Yarbrough received her M.A. from Emory University in 2000 and her Ph.D. from Emory University in 2003.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Rice University School of Humanities faculty and Dean of Humanities Nicolas Shumway for making this project possible by sharing career experiences and opinions with the Gateway Study of Leadership fellows through one-on-one interviews. Much appreciation goes to Dean of Social Sciences Lyn Ragsdale for her ongoing support and encouragement, and Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan for his counsel and guidance this year. Our heartfelt gratitude to the Gateway Associates and supporters of the Gateway programs for making projects like this possible. Many thanks also to the 2014-15 Turning Points team, as well as to current and past Gateway Study of Leadership directors and fellows for their tremendous amount of time and effort to move this project forward with enthusiasm, care and excellence to a new level each year.
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Featuring Humanities