Service to the Community
Forming meaningful partnerships with community organizations
In 2015, as discussed in Service to the Discipline, I brought the Virginia Humanities Conference to Marymount under the theme “The Humanities and/in the Public Sphere.” In keeping with the scholarly goals of the conference, I opened the conference to the wider Marymount and DC metro area community, as well as "alt-ac" or "alternative academic" and institutional speakers. The public is an important part of our work as humanists, and without a real and material sense of outward-facingness, we are doomed, potentially, to irrelevance. I was very proud to have members of the Arlington community and several non-profit and governmental participants at the conference, both as attendees and participants--participants attended from a wide variety of institutions, like JMU Justice Studies and Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Non-Violence, Drexel University, The Catholic University of America, Waynesboro Public Library, Salt Lake Community College (yes, Nevada!), Smithsonian American Art Museum, and National Archives and Records Administration. You can read a precis of the event, sent to the provost's office, here. In the feedback I collected, attendees noted the range of presenters and significance of the theme:
The speakers were all very good, and there was definitely an atmosphere of congeniality. I liked that there was discussion among students and academics. The theme of the conference was very timely and appropriate. I like hearing some of the projects that were being done in the classroom and in the public.
This meritorious service deepened the relationship between Marymount and the DC metro community.
Delivering expert commentary in public forums
In addition to dramaturging and co-producing a performance for the Capital Fringe Festival based on my scholarly research about Mary Toft--a project that I locate primarily in my scholarship section, but which also has a public-facing aspect in which I am positioned as representative of Marymount University--I recently served as an expert commentator for the open-access radio show, Choose to be Curious. Lynn Borton, host of Choose to be Curious at WERA FM, the public radio station in Arlington, VA, invited me on to discuss the language of curiosity in history, which was a very exciting prospect. I spoke on the relation between the gendered representation of curiosity in the early modern period, ideology, and John Milton’s creation of Eve in Paradise Lost. At the time of writing, this show is currently ranked in the top 50 interviews available on MixCloud. This work is exceptional service to the community that draws clearly on my role as a faculty member at Marymount University to raise our public profile.