Precarity, Caregiving, and Covid
In the years after the Spanish Flu, no one wanted to talk about it. Elizabeth Outka describes this phenomenon of cultural erasure in her timely book Viral Modernism (2019). [1] A global pandemic that killed more people than World War I was rarely represented directly in modernist literature. Illness was harder to memorialize than war; it challenged narrative structures; it was a miasma rather than a blast. In examining these gaps and silences, Outka draws out experiences that are hiding in plain...
Going Nowhere
In the summer of 2021, as an unemployed theater and performance studies scholar and mother of a four-year-old with a partner working two full-time jobs to provide for us, I often find myself wishing to escape from my life. Specifically, as my back seizes up and my son requests me to play a third “unboxing Batman toys” Youtube video of the day, I wish to escape my body, to escape my perspective, to escape the pandemic, to escape the everything and the everywhere of the current, long, multi...
Precarious Adjuncthood and Care-Giving Solutions
In the fall of 2018, I embarked on a grant study titled “Teaching with Liveness.” My pedagogical premise was that as theater educators, we should be using live theater as a part of our tool kit. I hired, directed, and paid actors to perform scenes from plays my classes were reading to workshop in real time and glean what liveness can do, but also to use as a learning tool that could be generalized to understand all the theater we were learning about in my theater history and script analysis...
Running Toward Reprieve: One Faculty Member’s Experience with Precarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
It was a Tuesday morning in April of 2020, and I had just seen the news of Ahmaud Arbery , the young African-American male who was shot while jogging through a suburban neighborhood in Georgia. [1] I had been preparing to join my live virtual composition class, as I had every other Tuesday since in-person classes had shuttered and moved online in March. Only today, I struggled to find the words to begin class as usual, as I watched nervously to see whether my husband would make the bend to enter...
Caring in the Mean/times
My first book, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration, was published in the Spring of 2020, when the first wave of the coronavirus hit the UK and we entered our first lockdown. Needless to say, it was not the historical season I imagined it to appear. The book is concerned with what I call late modernist chronophobia—a fear of the past and the future together—and with how individuals and the British state managed temporal anxieties in the years surrounding the...
Re-setting the Table: Academic Ableism, Precarity, and Teaching Stein in the Pandemic
It was September 24, 2020, and my “Gender and Care in Modern US Poetry” class had just had a tough conversation. For the first three weeks of the semester, the students had been remarkably engaged. But something shifted as we moved into week five. My carefully conceived arc from eugenic modernism to the “crip” poetics of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons fell flat. I stopped class and asked what was going on. After a quiet minute, students started to talk about exhaustion, fear, and a shared sense...