Alumni – Page 9 – Institute for Recruitment of Teachers

Debut Book Provides Intersections of Passing and Psychoanalysis by Donavan Ramon, IRT ’07

Donavan Ramon, IRT ’07 shares commentary on his first book, Striking Features: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing Narratives published by Mercer University Press. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

How does psychoanalysis animate racial passing and how does racial passing inspire psychoanalysis? Despite long-held beliefs that the two have nothing in common, I assert that psychoanalysis is relevant for understanding the reasons behind jumping the color line. Beginning with the premise that Sigmund Freud created psychoanalysis to contend with his own anxieties about race, I explore canonical and non-canonical passing narratives using psychoanalytic perspectives. By closely reading narratives by Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Anita Reynolds, Danzy Senna, Vera Caspary, Anatole Broyard, and Philip Roth, I advance several provocative claims about the intersections of passing and psychoanalysis. Chief among them are the youthful trauma and psychological consequences of racial passing. For instance, while the death drive motivates fictional racial passers to hasten their own deaths, those who pass in real life often seek their own immortality through print despite hiding their Blackness. This interdisciplinary work threads psychoanalysis and other theoretical perspectives through persuasive close readings of twentieth and twenty-first-century racial passing narratives, concluding with a meditation on today’s ineffective language of race. Scholars of race, African American Literature, American Literature, and psychoanalysis will find my book compelling.

IRT Alumni Author Request

Many times throughout the year, the IRT acknowledges donors and volunteers, who are both IRT alumni and non-alumni thanking them for their service. As we continue to see so many of our esteemed alumni contributing to their fields as published authors, the IRT thought including a signed copy of an alumni book with these acknowledgments would be a powerful way to further the connection of IRT supporters.

If you are an alum and have a published book that you are interested in sharing in this way, please send a signed copy or two to the IRT office. We will be accepting signed copies on an ongoing basis and sending them to the many wonderful individuals who help the IRT community in their own unique and important ways.

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irt@andover.edu

A list of IRT Alumni Publications can be found on the IRT Blog!

IRT Hiring Advisors!

The time to hire Statement of Purpose Advisors (SOPAs) is upon us! The IRT seeks to hire 15-20 alumni or similarly qualified applicants to serve as SOPAs for the incoming 2024 cohort. A full description of the role, length of employment, compensation, and qualifications can be found in the job description here. The deadline to apply is March 17^th.

Anyone with questions about the role should reach out to Arts & Sciences Programs Specialist Brittany A. Zorn at bzorn@andover.edu. Previous SOPAs have said about the role:

“I applied to be an SOPA advisor because I would not be where I am today without IRT. The individualized attention I received through the program, the academic and emotional support, and the knowledge I gained was priceless. It is my greatest hope that I can give any student I work with the same feeling of confidence that no matter where I ended after the application deadline was over, I had done everything I could. Every individual in the IRT program belongs in academia, and I am incredibly proud to be a part of this program.”
Yasmin Mendoza, IRT ’21

“I’m really excited to return to the IRT community as a Statement of Purpose Advisor. With the support of Leslie and LaShawnda a few years ago, I found the process of writing a Statement of Purpose to be an important and rewarding intellectual journey that helped me refine my ideas, weave my lived experiences and interests into a narrative, and articulate my scholarship and its significance in different words. I look forward to becoming a thought partner to IRT scholars in their intellectual adventures!”
Woohee Kim, IRT ’19

The IRT Furthering Connections and Conversation

In partnership with educational thought leaders across the country, the IRT engages in conversations on the current landscape, implementing change, and sharing knowledge.

October 2023

In October Catherine Wong, IRT Associate Director and Manager of Programs, co-presented with Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell, PhD at the 13th International Conference on Education and Justice led by Kevin Kumashiro, PhD, currently the Interim Dean of the School of Education at Hofstra University, and hosted by the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, College of Education, University Laboratory School (HI) and Hawai‘i Scholars for Education and Social Justice (HSESJ). The theme of the conference was “Collective Scholarship for Public Pedagogy and Against Empire,” and the title of their workshop was “Whose Talk Story? Our Talk Story; Battling the Empire Through Pōkā Laenui’s Process of Decolonization.”

(L-R) Jennifer Dazo Bishop, Ke Kula Kaiapuni ‘O Pū‘ōhala, Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell, Co3 Consulting, Jose Paolo Magcalas, California State University at Los Angeles

The 2023 UNCF/Mellon Programs Conference

IRT Education Programs Specialist Leislie Godo-Solo, IRT ’91 collaborated with colleagues and presented in this one-day workshop. This year’s annual conference, which was held in Atlanta, focused on the imperative to transform the academy.

On Process: Tenure and Beyond

David Sterling Brown, IRT ’08, Associate Professor of English at Trinity College in Connecticut

In 2009, thanks to IRT—and the exceptional guidance I received from my IRT advisor Leislie Godo-Solo—I was accepted into NYU’s English PhD program off the waitlist. Despite applying to about ten grad programs, NYU was the only one that accepted me and my low GRE score, which recalled the low 940 combined SAT score I had when my undergrad alma mater Trinity College (Connecticut) accepted me in 2001. And so, I quit my job as Teach For America’s Connecticut Recruitment Director and began commuting from Connecticut, my home state, to NYU for several years as I took grad classes and taught, and eventually finished drafting my dissertation during my 2013-14 Trinity College Ann Plato Predoctoral Fellowship. With my dissertation fully drafted by Spring 2014, I went on the academic job market that Fall and landed a job as Assistant Professor of English, of Shakespeare and critical race studies, at the University of Arizona.