Welcome Monique McDade
We’re excited to welcome Monique McDade this fall as our new Assistant Professor of Teaching in Early American Literature. Below, search chair Tekla Bude explains why Monique was such a great fit for the role:
“The Search Committee was initially impressed with Monique’s teaching portfolio, which ranges from Early American literature to the poetry of Taylor Swift and the contemporary romance novel, as well as her book project on the literature of the American West, which has already made a name for itself in her field. Monique’s also a lightning-quick thinker, and anyone who’s had the pleasure of hearing her give a talk or work with students can see she’ll be a great mentor, teacher, and conversation partner.
More than that, Monique’s on-the-ground work, where she partners with public libraries and literacy programs, will be a unique new addition to our department; I think she’ll give English majors a chance to see the utility of their discipline in the real world – how the humanities positively impacts people’s lives at the local level.”
Read on for Monique’s takes on the questions we pose to all new faculty, from the rich possibilities of the new Assistant Professor of Teaching position to the magic of learning through primary source material.
Looking back on your campus visit, is there a moment that stands out to you? An interaction or an impression that made you think that you could really be happy here?
I had a truly outstanding campus visit and I knew it was home when I left feeling more inspired and energized than when I had gotten there. I credit this to every person I spoke with on my visit but also to the students I had a chance to interact with in the classroom during my teaching demonstration. They were reading Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and I came prepared to set them up with a cultural lens through which to read the text. It was the end of the quarter, and they were no doubt stressed and exhausted, but they were so welcoming and ready to take on anything I threw at them.
What are you looking forward to about joining our faculty?
There are so many cool things happening at OSU and one of them is the new Assistant Professor of Teaching position, which I am excited to hold. What hooked me was a position that balances teaching and research and recognizes the importance of research to ethical and productive teaching. There is so much support in this role to be innovative in teaching and to try new and out of the box ways of making academic learning fluent with the lives our students live outside our classrooms.
Can you share a few top-shelf books—books that you love, that you would happily re-read every year, that helped shape your love of literature?
I like to explore writers from the places I have lived. Since I have been in Michigan for the past three years, I have grown obsessed with Edna Ferber who was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Most know her for Show Boat, but my favorite texts are So Big, which tells a similar story to F. Scott Fitzgerlad’s The Great Gatsby but from a mother’s perspective (as if from Gatsby’s mother’s perspective). It was also published in the same year but, unlike The Great Gatsby, it won a Pulitzer. Probably my favorite Ferber text is Giant, which offers a commentary on Texas as it is moving to become a “giant” oil producing region.
What is the pleasure of research for you? Where might your research take you in the years ahead?
As someone who studies the 18th and 19th centuries, I am interested in bringing these “old” texts into conversation with contemporary conversations and concerns. The power in the humanities is our ability to tell a story of our culture out of the stories that have been published along the trail of human existence. American 18th and 19th century texts help us understand the possibilities in where we can go as a culture once we confront what has been.
What would a dream teaching day look like for you? What might students have read? How might they engage with it in and you in class? (Lots of directions to take this. I’d just love for readers to get a sense of your teaching style.)
I love a teaching moment when students feel a text as a living thing. For instance, working with students in the archive is always fun. When students read a book that seems ages away from being relevant to them and then suddenly, they confront a hand written letter by the author that details their struggles with writing the text or a photograph of the person, place, or thing that inspired the book, there is a palpable sense of interconnectedness and legacy. It is a beautiful thing.