Instructo-tron 1000

I’m always a bit adverse to lengthy introductions where I list credentials and talk about my research ad naseum and sound like an egotistical jerk. But I do think it’s important that you all know that I take my work seriously, and that you’re learning from a person with a sound background in Science and Technology Studies, history of science, and the humanities. So, to that end, here’s a bit about me condensed way down into something that is hopefully meaningful.

Education:

So, right now, as you know, I’m at UIC working on a dissertation. I am a PhD Candidate which means I’ve completed my coursework and taken my exams. I passed the following fields: Modern British History, World History, Science and Technology Studies, Teaching of History. It was not easy, but it was awesome. Learning is the best.

Before that I studied at Eastern Illinois University where I completed an M.A. in European History and American Intellectual History. And in my undergraduate experience at Illinois Wesleyan University I finished a B.A. in History, as well as a B. M. in Vocal Performance.

A lot of my work, even back at Eastern and Wesleyan, has broadly involved the history of science. (And without really knowing it, I was also doing STS-type analysis at Eastern, especially network analysis.) But over the years I’ve come to develop a particular interest in the history of psychiatry as it relates to the professionalization of that field at the end of the 19th century and the effect that professionalization had on the public, especially as medically-defined categories of gender are concerned. More on that below.

Teaching:

Teaching is incredible. Teaching is my life’s blood. I would eat it for breakfast if I could, and it would probably taste like Michelin Star, home-made, fire-crusted marshmallows.

I’ve been a TA at UIC for the past four years (closing out my fifth now), and I am also a tutor with Varsity Tutors, working primarily with writing. Before that I taught private voice lessons.

STS accolades:

You are perhaps wondering if I’ve got the cred to be teaching you, and at this point I would argue that I do (although I definitely have a lot left to learn both on my own and also within this class.) I passed my STS field exam with high marks, and I’ve written and presented my work on the history of medicine/psychiatry in a number of places. Here’s a smattering of my work:

• “Practicing Normativity: Self-Fashioning, Letter Writing, and the Male Patients of Holloway Sanatorium for the Insane, 1880-1910” (10th Annual Graduate History Symposium, Toronto, ON, 7-8 February, 2014)
• “All Things in Moderation: Social Expectation, Letter Writing, and the Male Patients of Holloway Sanatorium for the Insane, 1880-1910” (6th Annual Windy City Graduate Conference, Chicago, IL, 2 November 2013)
• “Eclectic Psychiatry: Robert S. Carroll and the Social Construction of Neurasthenia” (Mid-America Conference on History, Springfield, MO, 25-27 September 2008)
• “’Advertising would never again have it so plush’: The Therapeutic Ethos and Advertising in Good Housekeeping, 1920-1929” (Eastern Illinois University Graduate Exposition – Graduate Research Symposium, Charleston, IL, 18 April 2008)

Writing:

Aside from teaching, writing is my other true passion. I go back and forth on what makes me happier–teaching or writing–and I can never decide. I love everything about it–the smell of paper, the feel of pens, the thrill of a well-crafted sentence, all of it. Right now, I have two main projects.

STS Dissertation:

First, of course is my dissertation, tentatively titled “There is Method in His Madness: The Cultivation and Enactment of Male Normativity in the British Asylum System, 1880-1910.” My dissertation tells the story of the men who lived and worked within Holloway Sanatorium for the Insane in Surrey, England—an asylum designed to meet the needs of the middle-class. I am interested in analyzing the moment where social expectations upon British men entered the asylum, circulated within its walls in partnership with the expectations of investors, doctors, and other patients, and then reified into what is called “normative masculinity.” These norms for male behavior informed patient recovery, medical diagnosis, and administrative measures.

In order to assess the processes by which late-Victorian male normativity was constructed, I engage with systems of prose-based mapping—or, in other words, I do STS analysis.

For instance, I compare patient demographics, length of stay, and diagnosis, while attending to their letters, the conversations they have with their attendants and each other, and the concerns of their family. Likewise, I place the medical superintendent within a larger framework of professional development where his decisions are framed by peer-review, collective diagnostic development, and scientific, gentlemanly behavior. I also consider the administrators within their network of aristocratic investors, philanthropists, and government, and non-government systems of policing and charity. My goal is to place these maps, non-hierarchically among each other so that I can analyze the meaning of the unexpected connections between doctors and day-laborers, aristocrats and the manically depressed, and so on. In the efforts of complete symmetry of study, I also include tools, medicines, therapies, and material asylum culture as a part of these networks of relationship as agents of change and choice. Taken together, these relationships demonstrate that diagnosis and male normativity were co-constitutive constructions that were then enforced by those in authority. Significantly, this points to the historical nature of gender, undermining arguments for tis naturalization or universalism.

STS Novels:

Second, then, is a series of historical fiction/fantasy/magical realism novels that take place concurrently in Gilded Age Chicago and Atlantis (which in these books is an island that floats in the Bermuda triangle.) I haven’t yet figured out how to condense this work down into a thirty second speech or an abstract (unlike my dissertation which suffered that fate as soon as I started going to conferences). But suffice it to say that inclusivity, networked beliefs, conservation, and income equality are important themes, along with the chemistry of magic, the politics of immortality, and precisely one elf.

Other Stuff I Dig and Would Probably Call a Hobby if that Word Weren’t Totally Weird:

Since you were all kind enough to share your interests, here are a few of mine: singing with the Wicker Park Choral Singers; cooking tasty vegetarian things, often from this website or this one; learning to run in a way that isn’t completely spastic; writing, obviously; avoiding laundry; hanging with friends; using candles and kerosene lamps; watching any show with a psychologically intriguing undertone; watching any show that makes me laugh until I cry; reading (in the same categories as my TV-watching); herb gardening; fish owning; volunteering at the International Museum of Surgical Science; buying cool socks (see: avoiding laundry); visiting family in the Pacific Northwest; drawing, mostly 2D and colored pencil; table-top RPG-ing.

Gender:

Finally, I think it’s important that I share with you more directly that I am gender-nonconformant, or transgender. For me–because this identity category changes based on the person–this means that at any given time the way I see myself in my mind is probably at odds with the way society sees me. My self-understanding does not match my physical characteristics, and, unfortunately, physical characteristics are still the #1 arbiter of immediate identity-making–the place where all other assumptions start.

My identity, then, can be problematic or disconcerting, both for me and for others. But it can also be expansive and wonderful–like having a second set of eyes or a new pair of lenses through which I can view the world, and through which others can learn to see, too. As such, I have become a person of vivid imagination, intense compassion, and flexible definition.

My world is the most lovely shade of warm dove grey.

What does this mean for our interactions? Very simply it means that I ask you respect my self-representation and chosen name and pronouns–which, because you’re all fantastic, you’ve already done. So, more to the point, I want you all to know that it is because of inclusive people like you that I can move through the world in a comfortable manner, taking on each day with confidence. You all rule. Thank you, so much.