A WEIRD PROJECT & WEIRD PEDAGOGY

I’m reminded sometimes that I really believe in the methodology behind this project. Maybe that sounds silly; of course I believe in it, I’ve certainly poured enough energy into it. It’s just that the whole project is sort of a joke—I mean, it’s a kind of complicated, extremely time-consuming, pretty esoteric joke about (on?) academia. And there’s a significant air of laughter at the highly polished, professionalized structures we’ve set up around art and creative work throughout this project as well. I think it’s funny. I put my Ph.D. certificate on my refrigerator. I talked about Captain America’s butt at academic conferences. I wrote TWICE AS MUCH as I needed to for my dissertation just so I could justify close reading gay sex alongside Victorian ghosts!! Hilarious.

But, like, you know, I do actually think this is a legitimate method of scholarship. A valuable method. A portable method, which can be applied to any number of subfields within literature and the arts. A method that, if framed the right way, is pretty compatible with more traditional academia. Multimodal, cross-platform, interdisciplinary—in the tradition of queer scholarship that blends the personal and academic—a way of making the case for the humanities in this time of precarity. I think I’ve put my energies mainly in places other than academic publishing, however, because the heart of what I do in academia, why I want to be here, is actually teaching.

In fact, it’s possible that teaching is a more natural extension of the methodology behind this project than academic publication is. Especially undergraduate teaching, which encourages students to connect what they do in the classroom with their lives, their communities, their society. The longer I teach, the more I understand the value of projects like mine, projects that meld literary criticism and creative work, critical writing and public-facing communication. My students read detective fiction and make their own detective as a way to articulate their point of view on justice, power, and knowledge; they turn a portion of Dracula into a social media post in which Mina and Lucy become real young women grappling with gendered expectations in their love lives. This semester, one class is going to attempt an online “library” to share of all sorts of texts we find meaningful to our lives. I hope it turns out really weird.

This project is both theory and practice. And my teaching is both theory and practice. We think and theorize through creation. We recognize that thinking and theorizing are themselves a kind of creation. My teaching feeds my work, my work feeds my teaching—and it’s fun. I’m really lucky. I’m happy to be starting another school year.

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Lu’s writing: Hannibal, BDSM, and form in fanfiction