Human fact -- slight time change

Notice for students enrolled in this semester's Human Fact course:

This course will now be meeting from 6:30-8:30pm (ten minutes later than previously scheduled). All other information remains the same.

Introducing Amber Musser: Draper's New Faculty Fellow in Gender Politics

This semester, Draper is delighted to welcome two new faculty fellow members to our program. Amber Musser joins us as the faculty fellow in Gender Politics and will be teaching two courses for us this year: 'Introduction to Gender Politics I: Melancholy, Politics, and Identity' and 'Topics in Gender Politics: Objects of Affection.' Please see below for her introduction.

Amber Musser joins the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program as an Assistant Professor/ Faculty Fellow in gender politics. Dr. Musser received an A.B. in Biology and History of Science from Harvard (2002), a M.St. in Women’s Studies from Oxford (2003), and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard (2009).

My work focuses on psychoanalysis, queer affect, and theories of subjectivity. My dissertation, "On the Subject of Masochism," is a history of the various readings and re-readings that produced masochism's discursive shift from psychiatry to critical and queer theory. Portions of my dissertation have been published: “Masochism, a Queer Subjectivity” in Rhizomes and "Reading, Writing ,and the Whip" forthcoming in Literature and Medicine. All of my work is a dialogue between history and philosophy of science, critical theory, queer and feminist theory, and critical history. In addition to bringing science and gender and sexuality studies together in conversation, I believe that treating these areas together reveals a new space in which to situate and destabilize our prevailing notions of subjectivity and agency. This perspective allows me to focus on understanding race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, and class as critical dimensions of personal experience, which also extends to the realm of science. In keeping with this theme, I have published an article, “From Our Body to Yourselves,” which discusses the shift in concepts of Woman and community within the Women’s Health Movement in the 1970s. I have also been working on an article, “The Obscure Object of Desire,” that interrogates negotiations of intimacy and sexuality in relationships with inanimate objects. In addition to turning my dissertation into a book, I am currently researching queer attachments to objects and embodiments of multiple subjectivities.

Introducing Rebecca Colesworthy: Draper's New Faculty Fellow in Literary Cultures

This semester, Draper is delighted to welcome two new faculty fellow members to our program. Rebecca Colesworthy joins us as the faculty fellow in Literary Cultures and will be teaching one course for Draper this fall: 'Introduction to Literary Cultures I.' Please see below for her introduction.

Rebecca Colesworthy joins Draper as the new Faculty Fellow/Assistant Professor in Literary Cultures after having received her PhD in English from Cornell University. Her dissertation, entitled “Modernism’s Gifts,” explores the relationship between modernist ethics and poetics by juxtaposing the work of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Stevie Smith with theories of the gift and exchange drawn from the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. In addition to completing articles on Jean Rhys and on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, she looks forward to undertaking her next project, which considers the ways in which various 20th-century writers reimagine the traditionally exceptional position of the feminine subject with respect to moral laws.

Professor Colesworthy attributes much of her investment in interdisciplinarity to her longstanding interest and work in the field of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. As an undergraduate concentrating in English and Women’s Studies at Brown University, she had the opportunity to develop a course of study at once variegated and specific to her intellectual concerns. After graduating, she worked as a research assistant for three Brown faculty members: Professor Carolyn Dean in History, Professor Mary Ann Doane in Modern Culture and Media, and Professor Elizabeth Weed at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Before attending Cornell, she also worked for two years at the National Council for Research on Women – a nonprofit network of feminist research, advocacy, and policy centers – where she gained significant insight into the difficulties and rewards of bringing the humanities and the social sciences into dialogue.

An introduction

Hello, readers of in.ter.reg.num! I'm the new administrative aide at the Draper program, and with that great responsibility comes the great privilege of being a contributor to this blog. Sort of like Spiderman, just the other way around.

In any case, if you were to look at the official Draper website and find me on the administration page , you would see my interests listed as: "Food (especially culture, sustainability, and hunger issues), fiction writing, contemporary literature." All this is true, but since we're in a slightly more informal environment here, I can add that I also enjoy Coney Island, dressing up, children's literature, American football, and pretending to be a mixologist. And that, at any given moment, I usually have one thing that I'm a little obsessed about; currently, it's Gone With the Wind, which I just started reading, and which, so far, is well worth the back-ache I get from carting it around.

I'm also really happy to be working at the Draper program. Not only have Robin Nagle, Robert Dimit, and Larissa Kyzer all been welcoming and wonderful to work with, the students have been equally delightful. Some of my friends don't understand this, but I can't wait to do the part of my job that involves entering student thesis titles into a database, because I can't wait to get a peek at all the marvelous ideas that Draper students are playing with. Having most recently worked at NYU's College of Nursing, this is a welcome change for my liberal-artsy tastes.

I will be posting pertinent info on this site - calls for papers and the like - but hope to add a more personal post once in a while as well. Thanks for indulging me in my introduction, and please stay tuned!

Why get a master's degree, anyway?

Years ago I saw a poster that said simply, "Change your mind." It was an advertisement for a meditation class. Clever, succinct and almost a dare, the phrase could just as well advertise what happens when a university gives its students its best.

In a troubled economy, questions about value and worth are especially urgent. Such questions extend to all fields, including higher education. There's been debate in the press recently about the cost and value of college in general, and there's been debate about the master's degree in particular.

At the end of June, the New York Times asked a panel of experts -- two professors, one personal finance consultant, and a former university president -- what an MA is worth (you can read their responses here). It's an important question, except that the answers in the Times use a narrow understanding of "worth." The respondents talked mostly about whether or not an MA will help the recipient earn more money. In that context, they concluded that a master's degree is a waste of time.

But there are many ways to evaluate "worth" beyond the limited measure of dollars.

A person stepping into a master's program has made a commitment to be part of a community of scholars, which in and of itself is pretty exciting. If she's sincere in her commitment, going to school is not a "hobby" or a casual endeavor. It is consuming, the way training becomes consuming for a serious athlete. Already the student is drawn out of herself and into a larger world. There's something heady, even a little intoxicating, about a classroom full of people trying to understand how, for instance, a new interpretation of French postmodern feminist literature can influence the controversy about Muslim women wearing religious headscarves in Paris. Does such insight guarantee the student a higher salary when she's finished her degree? Nope. But does it change, even in a small way, her perception of the world around her? It certainly can. And does this matter?

Absolutely.

It points to the most significant benefit of taking the degree, and recalls the gentle exhortation of that poster from the past. A true education cannot leave a student unchanged. Over time, she comes to perceive more detail, nuance, interconnection, and potential in everything around her. Whether she's studying landscape ecology or American colonial history or Anglophone literature or early childhood education or molecular anthropology, her world becomes wonderfully more complicated the more she studies.

She will also be changed by the work required to do well. The countless hours reading, researching, attending and participating in classes, listening to colleagues differ or find consensus, influence her thinking and her sense of connection to and responsibilities within the larger world.

Then there's the writing. Any master's program worth its salt (from the Latin sal, the root of the word "salary") requires students to write. And write. And write. No matter what comes after the MA, a student who becomes a competent writer graduates with a skill marketable across nearly all job categories. We're back to the monetary rewards of the degree, but this particular point wasn't mentioned by the quartet who wrote for the Times. I'll even make the claim that if a student (at any university) does not become a better writer by the time she has earned the master's, then that university has failed her.

It's true that an MA at a private research university can be expensive. It's also true that a direct link between that degree and a higher-paying job is sometimes elusive. But it's hard to argue that there is no link at all. The person who emerges from the classes and the research and the writing with that master of arts is not the same person who first enrolled. Her journey through the process has changed her mind -- and thus changed her world -- forever and completely.