Maintaining Inspiration by Turning Points

Maintaining Inspiration

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

Maintaining Inspiration

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: MAINTAINING INSPIRATION

The Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL) was started in 2011 by the School of Social Sciences’ Gateway. Every year a group of student fellows interview faculty and host distinguished guests to hear about their career journeys, experiences, and research endeavors. This year, the GSL team conducted and transcribed 49 interviews of humanities professors, which covered matters ranging from selecting a major and maintaining inspiration, to learning from failure and the future of academia. Most faculty expressed that their lives and careers had a certain turning point, and excerpts of these interviews are shared in this Turning Points series. “Maintaining Inspiration” focuses on the sometimes bumpy, sometimes smooth pathways to success, and what factors, from mentorship to intrinsic motivation, guided them along the way. Though twenty unique professors’ interview excerpts are presented in this book, their colorful advice revealed an underlying theme: do what you love, and the rest will follow. - Amber Lo, Editor

CONTENTS

Richard J. Smith, Ph.D. To Surpise and Delight

2. William B. Parsons, Ph.D. 3 Go to the Smorgasbord 3.

Geoffrey Winningham, M.S. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Never Too Late

Luziris Turi, Ph.D. Love for Work

Luziris Turi, Ph.D. Confidence & Rejection

Paul Hester, M.F.A. Art is Research

Cyrus C.M. Mody, Ph.D. Piece of Cake!

Nicolas Shumway, Ph.D. The Life of the Mind

9. 10.

Karin Broker, M.F.A. Leadership is Loaded

Leo Costello, Ph.D. Academia is Like Acting

11.

Christina Keefe, M.F.A. A Numbed Ego

12. Deborah Harter, Ph.D. 23 The Easiest Thing in the World 13.

Maya Soifer Irish, Ph.D. Makes Me Happy

About the Contributors 27 31 Acknowledgements

TURNING POINTS ONE

To Suprise and Delight Richard J. Smith, Ph.D. George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History, Rice University

Of course academic life is full of rewards that go beyond community service. Teaching and research are two of them. The rewards of the classroom are self-evident, but the appeal of research is less obvious. In some respects, research is like puzzle-solving; it allows us to investigate difficult problems and to seek meaningful answers. The joys of discovery are often breathtaking. Research is also a creative exercise in the sense that it requires interpretation. Facts are never enough. And in developing research strategies we try to ask questions that are not intuitively obvious. Personally speaking, I like to look at taken-forgranted phenomena and try to tease out their hidden significance and deeper meanings. Of particular interest to me are the ways that people in all societies categorize experience and natural 1

phenomena. I would go so far as to say, in fact, that culture is classification—the naming and arranging of “things” and ideas into systems of meaning. The analysis of other cultures becomes, then, a matter of evaluating these systems, their interrelationships, and their social manifestations. The trick is to avoid imprisonment by one’s own set (or sets) of conceptual categories.

TURNING POINTS TWO

Go to the Smorgasbord William B. Parsons, Ph.D. Professor of Religion, Rice University

I always grew up with an interest in religious studies, but I had no idea what I was going to do when I got to college at all. My first two years my mother said, “make sure you take a course in just about every considerable field.” She really wanted me to go the smorgasbord to find out what I wanted to do. And I took courses in economics, astronomy, music theory, philosophy, English, religious studies, and political theory. I mean, literally, I took just about everything. I even took a class in geology. After I declared my major in philosophy, I just went into philosophy. In those days philosophy and religious studies were sort of merged. And even when I went to graduate school I didn’t know what I was going to do. I did a Masters of Divinity at Yale, which is a prelude to becoming a minister, but it was a generalized degree in religion and I took courses in the philosophy department, the psychology 3

department, and in the divinity school. Again, I was exposed in a broad kind of a way. I wanted to get a feel for what the ministry might be like. I don’t think I ever thought I would seriously go into it though. I was interested in what that kind of career might entail, but I think by the time the end of my first year rolled around, I decided I would rather be going for a doctorate and stay in academia. It took me until age 23 or 24 to ultimately decide what kind of career path I wanted. But even in graduate school it’s hard for people who are in humanistic disciplines because jobs aren’t guaranteed. It’s not like going to law school or business school where you can look forward to some type of employment. It’s really possible to get a Ph.D. in a humanistic discipline and be left out. You might do a one year placement position, you might do some work in a local community college, but I think the stats are that now 25% of people in graduate school in humanistic disciplines get tenure track jobs; that’s one out of four. That’s not good. If you are going to go that route now, you have to go with wide-open eyes.

TURNING POINTS THREE

It’s Never Too Late Geoffrey Winningham, M.S. Lynette S. Autrey Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Visual and Dramatic Arts, Rice University

All of my work in photography is aimed at pulling it all into book form. Just like a writer would be thinking of writing a novel or a book of poems, I’m very oriented toward my finished product. For 11 years, from 1984-1995, I photographed Mexican fiestas. It was a very long project, in which I traveled as many as 20 times to Mexico, to the most remote parts of Mexico, photographing these ancient festivals that survive today. I spent so long doing it, had so much work to draw from, that the book was very difficult for me to bring together. I did the best I could. Had it been published the way I wanted it, it would have been a good enough book. But I entrusted the final editing to someone else, and that was a huge mistake.

When the book came out, it was a great disappointment. It was a disappointment in the beginning, and the longer I looked at it, the more disappointing it was. It was such a long, serious project for me and it came together in what I saw, and still see, as such a relatively mediocre work -- clearly my worst piece of work, but the one that I spent the longest time on. That was a huge disappointment. And how did I respond to that? By the time the book was out, I was already working on something else. I just tried to say to myself, “It’s dumb, look ahead, do better next time.” The book came out in 1997, so now 17 years later I’m actually going to spend time going back to this huge body of photographs, to re-edit, and re-shape the work into a different kind of book. My reaction is not that it’s over. I think I can still salvage the photos and create a different finished product. At the time, my reaction was that it at least had a great introduction. Actually, the guy that wrote the introduction ended up winning the Nobel prize -- so I look back to the star-studded introduction and hope to make a whole book that I can be proud of. It’s never too late. 6

TURNING POINTS FOUR

Love for Work Luziris Turi, Ph.D. Associate Director, Center for Lanuages and Intercultural Communication, Rice University

I truly enjoy what I do now. I never really thought about how important liking what you do is. But it’s key because even when I’m having a bad day, I still enjoy what I’m doing. The love I have for my field motivates me to keep up-to-date. I think the other thing is I can’t stay still. Sometimes people can become stagnant and then they’re not up-to-date or they don’t know what’s going on. I am very curious and I can’t stay still. I always need something to do, something to think about, and something to look into. In that sense my curiosity and my energy just make me want to know what’s going on. My research has shifted because I’m working with a center that focuses on languages, not literature, so a lot of the research I did with archives and with literature has been moved to the side, but 7

now my focus is on new ways of teaching second languages, Spanish in particular. I love teaching my students and I want to be better for my students. As cliché as it sounds I just love what I do. I’m excited when I think how I’m going to come to work tomorrow, and we’re going to talk about this event we’re doing for students or this new way to teach students. I think that the saying is true, that if you love what you do you don’t ever work a day in your life. I’m glad that 22-year-old me was brave enough to shift my path because I truly enjoy coming to work.

TURNING POINTS FIVE

Confidence & Rejection Luziris Turi, Ph.D. Associate Director, Center for Lanuages and Intercultural Communication, Rice University

In high school I was overachieving. I did more than I was asked. I was number six in my class. I was class president. People would say, “She’s so great, she’s so great.” They built this ego around me. A lot of students here at Rice can identify with that. You’re being fed all these ideas about who you are and how fabulous you are and how you’re a prodigy and you’re so smart. When I got my first interview ever I had really come to believe that I was going to get the job, because everyone had told me how great I was. More so because it was at UT-Austin, and it was in my field of Chicano/a studies, and my mentor knew someone there. I passed the first round of them looking at your file and I got a response: you have been selected among the hundreds of applications, you and five 9

other people are going to be interviewed. I literally had already thought about where I would buy my house, when I would move, how I would pack. It was all set up for me to get a job. I went to the interview and in my little mind I had just aced the interview because I was just talking to everybody and everybody was interested. I thought, I’m going to go home and I’m about to get a call from UT-Austin saying, “You’re going to get a tenure track job.” What I got was a rejection e-mail. I had never gotten that kind of rejection because, mind you, I had gotten every scholarship, every type of funding, every conference I wanted to go to. This was my first big rejection, and it was big because I thought I had it. I look back and I’m grateful for that moment to step back and say, “Okay, what’s going on?” to the egomaniac that I was.

TURNING POINTS SIX

Art is Research Paul Hester, M.F.A. Lecturer of Traditional and Digital Photography, Rice University

I think art is a research process; making visual artifacts is a form of research. For example I take photographs to find out, to discover, to test what a situation will look like in a photograph. The experience through time that we all have—walking around, sitting, looking—goes away, but the photograph freezes it. I like to take photographs of what’s happening to me at the moment, the perceptions that I’m having, the experience that I’m having, to see how I can represent that in a photograph. Driving over here, I was sitting in traffic. I was late, and there was a car in front of me and the slope of its rear window and the angle of the sun was creating an enormous bright hot spot, right in my face. Instead of complaining about it or honking my horn, I pulled 11

out my iPhone and took three or four pictures of it to see the degree of which the extreme contrast, the very extreme contrast, the very extreme brightness of the light and the darkness of the trees on either side, how that renders.Â

TURNING POINTS SEVEN

Piece of Cake! Cyrus C. M. Mody, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History, Rice University

One piece of advice a colleague of mine gives his students is, if someone asks you to do something in your career, the right response is, “Piece of cake!” If you just approach these tasks cheerfully and with the hope that you’re going to learn something new, even if you didn’t seek out that task, it will allow you to generate a lot of goodwill, but it will also help you learn new skills, which will be useful for other things.

TURNING POINTS EIGHT

The Life of the Mind Nicolas Shumway, Ph.D. Dean of Humanities and Frances Moody Newman Chair in Humanities, Rice University

Perhaps one person who most affected me was my dissertation director at UCLA. He was an Argentine refugee. He had had a very promising career in Argentina but when Juan Per贸n came to power in 1946, he, like a lot of opposition government employees, lost his job. He eventually made his way to the United States, first at the Pan-American Union as a researcher and later as a professor at UCLA. I think that his life in some ways was rather sad. He felt betrayed by his country and denied of the career he would have had in Argentina. There was a certain level of bitterness in him, but he was an extremely cultured man. He could talk about any topic, and introduced me to one of the great pleasures of Buenos Aires society, and that is being informed, literate, and able to address many different subjects, be it opera, Incan burial customs, or the challenges of creating a phonetic alphabet for Mandarin Chinese. He gave me a sense of what the life of the mind is all about. 15

TURNING POINTS NINE

Leadership is Loaded Karin Broker, M.F.A. Professor of Visual and Dramatic Arts, Rice University

Leadership is a loaded thing, because it means someone is leading and someone is following. It often has that look to it. Whereas in art, you want someone to be absolutely creative and individualistic. The beauty of art is you can have artists who affect how other people think and, I don’t think that means being a leader. Take Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks was tired and her feet hurt, so she sat on the bus and said “I’m not moving. I’m not moving to the back of the bus.” Rosa Parks is not taking the role of leader. But she’s that one individual voice that says I’m not going to think like you or I’m not going to agree with you, which absolutely affected people. Art has no formula. You decide your own formula and then you may have people saying “wow...that is very cool”...and they may steal a bit from you and use it for their own words.

TURNING POINTS TEN

Academia is Like Acting Leo Costello, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Art History, Rice University

Academia is a bit like acting, in as much as you have to deal with rejection. You need to have in one sense a short memory of stuff to not let it defeat you, and on the other hand, you have to take something from everything that doesn’t work out. I think for a lot of us the first time you send something off, often towards the end of graduate school, for peer review, for publication, and it comes back negative, that’s difficult. Those moments – even the positive peer reviews are off-putting. Those things in academia, all those failures, or even relative modified successes, are a real thing to be worked through. It doesn’t get easier; nobody likes rejection, but you learn to work with it. At some level, despite the rejections you have to keep yourself doing it. It might be an uphill battle. I want to do the things I want to do because there is 19

something in my brain that still feels like it needs to be scratched. Working on what you like makes all the difference in the world. I wrote this Turner book that took ten years and I often hear people at the end of their dissertations saying, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I hate this, I hate this dumb thing.â&#x20AC;? It was never like that for me. I have always worked on things that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m engaged by and want to work on. So it comes naturally.

TURNING POINTS ELEVEN

A Numbed Ego Christina Keefe, M.F.A. Professor-in-the-Practice of Visual and Dramatic Arts, Rice University

I was devastated by criticisms of my work! Are you kidding? It was awful. I think it’s having a sense of determination and awareness to open up and look at what’s wrong. One of the things that you learn in theater is that you have to take a risk. You have to fail miserably in order to come through to the other side and find out what really works. It’s a very strange beast because it’s very personal. When you have somebody look at your work, it’s very hard to look at it as, “Oh, that’s my work,” versus “That’s me.” There’s a need for us to remember, “This is the character, this is the work, and this is me.” That way I don’t think that I’m a bad person. After the initial “ugh,” then you have to go and ask, “What didn’t work and why?” It’s like that in science too.

When you get to a certain point in your life, you can really feel when something’s not right and you need that constructive criticism. That’s one thing I really try to give to my classes – a safe place for them to fail. This is a place where you can fall down, make a total mess, and then we’ll put you back together again. The more that young people can get that, the more they can then hear constructive criticism and go, “Oh yeah, this is again not about me. This is about the work I am doing.” As I get older that gets easier and easier to take, because my ego has numbed a lot.

TURNING POINTS TWELVE

The Easiest Thing in the World Deborah Harter, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Classical and European Studies, Rice University

It has been the easiest thing in the world to remain motivated, although at different times in my life itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been for different reasons. The amount of great fiction out there to be read is huge, and so of course at first itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a desire to be exposed to the great things that have been written. And I loved to teach. In the classroom I found it really great fun to share texts and ideas from students. What is nice in the university and in the humanities generally is that your interests can evolve. Whereas I began studying mostly narrative things like novels and short stories, I would eventually become very interested in poetry. And whereas early on I was interested in psychoanalysis and theoretical approaches to literature through psychoanalysis, eventually I would add feminist literary theory and Marxist theory.

Another way to remain engaged is to be constantly evolving in what you’re studying and what you’re teaching. Every semester I’m inventing new courses. But the most exciting thing has been writing. I’ve always enjoyed it, but it has become a passion, a really central passion for me now. The questions that I ask are different. Before, I might be interested in why Edgar Allan Poe writes in a certain way and how novels or approaches differ from some other writer. Now I’m much more interested in why we read fiction in the first place. What difference it makes. And how art works. The long and the short of it is that the humanist project is enormous. Great texts never lose their force. While the history of science is very interesting, the work that precedes later scientific work is often outdated and cast aside, whereas we will never tire of reading Homer’s Odyssey and The Iliad and Shakespeare. These are great texts that will always be great. The humanist task is therefore huge, and it is so rich that it would be impossible to lose interest.

TURNING POINTS THIRTEEN

Makes Me Happy Maya Soifer Irish, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of History, Rice University

How I remain motivated is really simple: I just really love history. If you don’t love what you are doing, if you don’t love your discipline, you are probably in the wrong career path. I always found history fascinating. I think historically. To pose a question and have me answer requires historical thinking to understand. Almost any problem that we see today, we have to go back in time to see how that institutional problem developed over time for a much deeper understanding of it. That process has always fascinated me. I feel privileged and fortunate that I am able to have this perspective. People without that interest in history don’t get the benefit of it. I can’t even understand how they hope to explain certain things without the historical analysis on which I rely.

I really do love history. I love writing about history. Everyday when I wake up I have a life, I have children, I have a family, and they’re all important for me. But everyday I wake up thinking about the Middle Ages, writing about Middle Ages, and reading about the Middle Ages. That gives me that enthusiasm and desire to keep going and be happy. It literally makes me happy. When people say, do what you love, it’s a dangerous proposition. What if you love something that doesn’t give you a job? I was in the job market for four years and, it looked like I was not going to get anything. I feel very lucky that I succeeded. Now that I have succeeded, I can enjoy every moment of it.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Karin Broker, M.F.A. is Professor of Printmaking and Drawing at Rice University and 1994 Texas Artist of the Year recipient. Her research interests include printmaking, large-scale drawings, and steel sculptural drawings. Ms. Broker received her B.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1972 and her M.F.A. from University of Wisconsin in 1980. Robert “Leo” Costello, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University. His research interests are focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art, and Marxist theory and aesthetics. Dr. Costello received his B.A. from Skidmore College in 1993, M.A. from American University in 1996, and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 2003. 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. Paul Hester, M.F.A. received a B.A. in art from Rice University in 1971 and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1976. Hester’s photographs of art and architecture have appeared in many books, magazines, and exhibitions as well as in museum collections. He dreams of a synthesis between his professional (public) images and his imaginative (private) musings and continues to play with the gap between Truth (documentary) and Beauty (fiction), mixing traditional photographic materials with the mutability of pixels.

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. Christina Keefe, Lecturer in the Theatre Program, has been a professional actor for over 20 years, working both in New York and regionally at such theatres as The West Side Arts, The Wilma Theatre, Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Lyric Stage and The Warehouse Theatre. She has taught acting, voice, movement, and directed for Duke University, Lehigh University, University of Houston, Muhlenberg College and DeSales University. She has completed the Shakespeare Intensive with Shakespeare & Co. and has a certificate from the British American Drama Academy. Christina also has her own private voice practice working with Houston professionals and teaches Ashtanga and Hatha yoga. She is a member of Actorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Equity, Screen Actors Guild and the Voice and Speech Trainers Association. Cyrus C. M. Mody, Ph.D. teaches the history of science, technology and engineering. His research focuses on the history of very recent physical and engineering sciences from 1970 to the present, with particular emphasis on the creation of new communities and institutions of research in the late Cold War and the post-Cold War periods. Currently, he is working on a history of the communities and institutions of nanotechnology, in collaboration with colleagues at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California-Santa Barbara, the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, and at Rice. Dr. Mody earned his A.B. from Harvard University and Ph.D from Cornell University.

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. Luziris Turi, Ph.D. is a Lecturer of Spanish as well as Associate Director of the Center for Languages and Intercultural Communication within the School of Humanities at Rice University. Her research interests include gender, race, class, feminism, and sexuality in literature. Dr. Turi earned her B.A. in 2003, her M.A. at the University of Houston in 2005, and her Ph.D. from the University of Houston in U.S. Latino Literature. Geoffrey Winningham, M.S. earned his undergraduate degree in English from Rice and his graduate degree in photography from the Institute of Design at Illinois Insttiute of Technology. He has taught photography at Rice since 1969. Mr. Winningham is best known for his seven books and three documentary films relating to Texas and Mexican culture. His photographs have been widely exhibited and collected by major museums throughout the U.S. and Mexico. His work in photography and

filmmaking supported by numerous fellowships and awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and 5 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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 to GSL 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.