Welcoming Surabhi Balachander

 

Professor Surabhi Balachander

 

 

 

 

 

It was not an ideal time for a campus visit. Oregon had just been walloped by an ice storm and campus had been closed for days. Despite logistical headaches and a late-breaking campus closure after hopes for a thaw, Surabhi Balachander—candidate for a tenure-track position in literary studies—not only enjoyed her visit but enjoyed it enough to accept our offer. Associate Professor Ray Malewitz, chair of the search, had this to say about Surabhi and why we’re all so excited for her to join us this fall:

“The search committee all agreed that Surabhi's hire will have a transformative effect upon our BA and MA programs. Her research interests in multiethnic American literature within rural contexts seem tailor-made for our land-grant university, and we're excited to see how those interests translate into a vibrant new set of courses for current and future students. We could not be more thrilled with this hire.”

Below, Surabhi answers a few questions about that now-infamous campus visit, some favorite books, and what lights her up as a teacher and scholar.

Your campus visit was quite an adventure (to say the least). Is there a moment that stands out to you as you look back on that experience?

I think I'll forever be using this to represent my campus visit: Evan's car got stuck on the ice downtown and I had to get in his driver's seat and hit the gas while he got out and pushed (If we had switched places, I guarantee we would never have gotten anywhere). I've never heard of another job interview that was this chaotic and still was a great experience thanks to everyone's hard work and good spirits.

 

We were all so excited when you accepted our offer. What are you looking forward to about joining our faculty?

For one, I'm looking forward to joining a group of people that could pull off a good campus visit under strange and constantly changing circumstances. I feel a strong alignment between my professional values and SWLF's priorities, and I'm looking forward to continuing my commitments to career and experiential education (especially as the English major grows!). And of course, I'm looking forward to being back in the classroom and getting to know OSU students.

 

Can you share a few top-shelf books—books that you love, that you would happily re-read every year for life, that helped shape your love of literature?

This is always a difficult question. Here are a few: Cane by Jean Toomer, A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan, America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo, A Tinderbox in Three Acts by Cynthia Dewi Oka, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay. For the last few months, I've been obsessed with Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, which I actually finished on my way to my campus visit, right before the chaos started. I give some credit to Kaveh Akbar for my good mood as I spent 7 hours in the Salt Lake City airport--this is a novel that makes me feel grateful to be alive.

 

What is the pleasure of research for you? Where might your research take you in the years ahead?

What I love most about research is conversation. I very much enjoy my practices of reading and writing, but they take on a lot more meaning when I'm talking to colleagues, students, and mentors about the ideas I'm working with. I've spent a lot of my career in extremely interdisciplinary spaces, where I talk to engineers, political scientists, public health scholars, and more, so I especially love finding resonances with research that may seem far afield from mine. I'm looking forward to continuing that at OSU. In the next few years, I expect to spend more time on a new project that thinks about the idea of "unexpectedness" in Asian American literature. This project continues some of my interests in rural America and otherwise "neglected" parts of the US, and also places an emphasis on settler colonialism and narratives of diasporic return.

 

What is a dream teaching day for you? What have students read for homework? What will you do with them in class? (Feel free to interpret this however you want; mostly hoping to get a sense of what lights you up as a teacher, and what our students might expect from you in the classroom.)

It's a little hard for me to answer this question because one of the things I love most about teaching is how it can be unpredictable. A dream teaching day for me is one on which I learn as much as anyone in the room. I've loved days on which, instead of assigning reading, I have us take the whole class session to work on mapping out and theorizing a course's central concepts. I also love the days where everyone turns out to have hated the assigned reading, but they all come with insightful critiques of it. My dream teaching day could even be one without a class, because I love getting to know students better and working on project ideas in office hours.