Tuesday, October 22, 2019

New Episode! Colleen Kennedy talks about her journey from the adjuncting to the Shakespeare Theater Company


                                                              Dr. Colleen Kennedy


This week, Remixing the Humanities sits down for a brief chat with Colleen Kennedy, the publicist for Washington D.C.'s Shakespeare Theater Company and talks about the road from academia to the "alt-ac," or, as Colleen calls it, "IRL jobs." She talks about how she tailored her job materials for a position off the tenure-track, and how she feels graduate students and humanities programs could do a better job of preparing students to work outside the academy. Additionally, she gives some advice on how graduate students can make sure that they are thinking of writing/communicating to readers of all stripes, and how cultivating a writing career outside of your dissertation or academic journals can be one of the wisest career moves you make. Also, she talks about how her new career provides something that is often lacking in academia - a work/life balance!

Check out the new episode here!

For more information on the Shakespeare Theater Company, head here!
Colleen is happy to share her experience with the curious! You can find her on Twitter at @ReadColleenK.

Please remember to share, rate, review, and subscribe! We can be found on Twitter and Facebook at humanitiesremix, and reach us via e-mail at humanitiesremix@gmail.com.

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

New Episode! We talk to Mary Rambaran-Olm and Adam Miyashiro about race, racism, and medieval/Anglo-Saxon studies.





 Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm                                    Dr. Adam Miyashiro


Mary Rambaran-Olm and Adam Miyashiro are no strangers to discussions of race and racism in medieval and Anglo-Saxon studies. Within the past few years, they helped found the organization Medievalists of Color, which aims to create a space for scholars who find themselves marginalized in a field with pernicious strains of white supremacy and Euro-exceptionalism. Mary recently drew even more attention to the matter by publicly resigning her position on the executive board of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at the second meeting of the Race Before Race symposium in Washington DC. Even now, members of the society are struggling to find a way to re-name and re-brand as a means to shed recent accusations and to ideally make the society more inclusive.

Mary and Adam join Remixing the Humanities to discuss recent developments in the field given the attention and fallout from Mary's speech at Race Before Race. We talk about what it means to have the scholarly and the public-facing conversations operating in tandem, and the dangers of "cloistering" academic inquiry within the confines of perceived prestige and rigor, as well as the real harm caused by ivory-tower gate-keeping. What cost to graduate students of color bear when they enter a field that wants them as students, but not necessarily as co-contributors? How do we push forward to make all fields of study more inclusive and welcoming? Does one need to operate within the per-existing system in order to affect change, or at what point does breaking with the norms become the catalyst for a real movement?

Please check out our new episode here!
And, as always, remember to like, share, rate and subscribe. Reach out to us on Twitter at @humanitiesremix, or via e-mail at humanitiesremix@gmail.com.

For more background information on Mary's speech at Race Before Race, click here.
Mary's piece for Medium can be found here.
A statement in support of Mary after her resignation can be found here.
A helpful anti-racist Twitter thread here.
More information on the long-unfolding drama of the fraught term "Anglo-Saxon" here and here.
Adam's piece on decolonizing Anglo-Saxon studies for In the Medieval Middle can be found here.