By Kira Schukar ’22
With several English professors taking a break from teaching and working off-campus this semester, the editors at The Words decided to catch up with two of our beloved faculty members. We reached out to Professors Daylanne English and Andrea Kaston Tange—both on sabbatical for the 2021-2022 academic year—to hear more about their personal projects, time spent at home, and reflections on life outside of the classroom.
How is your sabbatical going? What does a typical day look like for you? Do you miss teaching?
Prof. English:
“My sabbatical is going well. Because of the variety inherent in researching and writing, I don’t have what I’d call exactly ‘typical’ days. How a particular day unfolds depends a lot on what stage a particular chapter is in (research? outline? first draft? revision? eighteenth draft?). Also, these stages tend to overlap; for instance, revision often calls for further research. However, on most workdays, I end up doing some reading—both literature and literary (and other kinds of) scholarship—and doing some writing and revising. And I certainly do a lot of thinking! Right now, I am enjoying rereading (and in the case of Harlem Shuffle, reading) all of Colson Whitehead’s novels for a chapter I’m writing about his work. I’m also reading recent scholarship on Black time theory and queer Black time theory, as well as on Black spatial, geologic, and geographic theory, including Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures, Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, and Habiba Ibrahim’s Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life.
“I do miss teaching and, more generally, being in my various communities at Macalester. I definitely miss seeing my students (whether on zoom or in person) and experiencing that deeply shared commitment to our work and to one another in the setting of a class together. There is nothing like a great discussion. I also really miss dropping by my colleagues’ offices and just chatting. I was glad to be able to attend Prof. Geng’s recent book celebration, which was quite joyful and joyfully sociable, not to mention intellectually exciting.”
Prof. Kaston Tange
“I feel like I’m finally unwound enough from the stresses of the last few years of being Chair during a pandemic that I can actually focus on my sabbatical projects. It took me until about mid-September to get to that point (my sabbatical officially started June 1). A typical day is me, on the couch, with lots of coffee, writing or revising pretty diligently in the morning, when I tend to do my best thinking. Afternoons I reserve for researching and gathering, taking long walks, doing some reading. Every week has a little bit of a different rhythm, depending on what I’m trying to get done that week. Sometimes I have great writing days and will be focused for six or eight hours. Other days, I stare at the computer as if it’s from another planet, and I don’t know what to do with it. I am trying to learn that on those days, it’s okay—actually, it’s necessary—to stop trying to write and instead do something outside, exercise, bake, garden. Just be. I think academia conditions you to feel as though you ought to be working every single minute. It’s a hard thing to unlearn.
“I miss students and their energizing conversations, optimism, and curiosity. But I don’t really miss teaching yet. The classroom is a wonderful place, but prepping to teach several classes multiple times per week, giving feedback on papers, mentoring, advising, and emailing is a lot of very time-consuming and scheduled work. It’s truly wonderful to have unscheduled time right now, and I am deeply grateful for it. I’m sure by next fall I will be very excited to get back into the classroom, but right now, I am luxuriating in the lack of regular demands on my time.”
What is your favorite part about being on sabbatical? Least favorite part?
Prof. English:
“My favorite part about being on sabbatical is having the luxury of time to think deeply and deliberately about my scholarship, taking the time to immerse myself in a topic and ‘read around’ in it in order to gain the expertise I need to write about it. This is especially important given the interdisciplinarity of my work. I need to really learn all the disciplines I engage with. For example, my current book project (about which more below) involves sound studies, music studies, religious studies, historical studies, and, of course, literary studies. My other favorite part is having enough time in the mornings to take my dog to the dog park. Gemma (picture attached) is absolutely beside herself with delight at getting to run, at breathtaking speed, through the Minnehaha dog park several mornings a week. Also, ever since my dissertation-writing days, I have found that dog walks help me think through especially sticky parts of my scholarly arguments.
“My least favorite part of sabbatical, and really any scholarly project, is documenting my citations. I truly hate keeping track of my sources and making sure my citations are in proper Chicago or MLA style.”
Prof. Kaston Tange:
“Favorite part: I have gone from having to answer sixty or more emails per day to getting almost none at all. I don’t even check my inbox daily any more, and I just let my [auto reply] apologize ahead of time for my slower responses. It’s amazing how freeing it is to be able to assume that I don’t need to be distracted by constantly checking for urgent things I must deal with. I have been gulping down lots of NYT bestsellers in the evenings because I don’t have to sit back down to email and [do] tasks after dinner. It’s absolutely delightful to be reading just for pleasure.
“Least favorite part: It’s harder than I thought it would be to be working alone in my house. After 20 months of pandemic life, I really miss my colleagues and the delightful mental break of someone popping their head into your office to say hi, or chatting for five minutes when you walk down the hall to get coffee. Weirdly, sabbatical can be a bit lonely (which I think is more a factor of already having had such prolonged isolation before the sabbatical started). I have joined three different friends for writing group/accountability time, though: one on zoom with whom I write with three mornings a week; one local with whom I meet up in person one or two afternoons a week; and one for a check-in and goals-setting conversation on Monday mornings (we are both in the last push of trying to finish a book manuscript). So I guess this is me, being my usual optimist self, and trying to turn the least-favorite part into my most-favorite part.”
When was the last time you took a sabbatical? How does this year look different from your last sabbatical?
Prof. English:
“My last sabbatical was in Fall 2013. This year looks different because for the first time in my career I have a full-year sabbatical, which feels like a real luxury. Of course, the pandemic and the various stresses and crises in the U.S. and the Twin Cities make everything look different this year.”
Prof. Kaston Tange
“The last time I had a sabbatical was eleven years ago, and I had a first-grader and a preschooler at the time. Now I have a sophomore and a senior in high school—so instead of juggling snacktime and playdates and tea parties, I’m helping one kid navigate the college application process and watching the other in cross-country meets. Emotionally, it’s HUGELY different. Last time around, they were their own little people, but I felt stressed because I never had enough time to myself to write because they needed me so much. This time, they are their own big people, and I have all the time I could ever want to write, but I feel pangs when I realize that they do not need me nearly as often as I wish they did.”
Are there any projects you are hoping to start or finish this year?
Prof. English:
“I am working on a book titled Soul Sounds: The Afterlife in African American Literature and Music. I am very much hoping to finish the book this year; we shall see! I am not sure at this relatively early point in my sabbatical whether that will be feasible. Book-length scholarly projects inevitably take at least some unexpected turns.
“The book’s central argument is that literary and cultural studies scholars need to take the afterlife seriously as an idea, and a politically, socially, aesthetically, and personally empowering one at that. Representations of the afterlife are common in African American literature (students who have taken my early African American literature class should recall the ending of Harriet Wilson’s novel here) and music (most familiarly in sorrow songs, but also in some well-known hip hop). Yet the topic remains fairly neglected in scholarship about African American literature and music. At the same time, Soul Sounds will consider how, in the present, the afterlife has taken on both deeply painful but also potentially healing meanings for African American people in the contexts of the COVID-19 pandemic and police violence and their terribly disproportionate effects on Black people. Spiritualism and Afrofuturism, Black afterlives and Black futures—all can help us imagine and build a better world. This idea will sound familiar to students who have studied Afrofuturism with me. Ultimately, this book, like Each Hour Redeem, will have been shaped by, and in turn will shape, my teaching at Macalester.”
Prof. Kaston Tange:
“Oh, so many! I am chipping away at a monograph that is about 90% done (the last 10% is the biggest slog). I thought this would be done before the sabbatical started, but [COVID] threw a monkey-wrench in those plans. I have a small project I’m researching and writing sporadically with my daughter, about a 16-year-old jailbreaking horsewoman and violin prodigy in the 1920s. Who knows what that will lead to, but it’s wonderful to have a thing that’s ours together. I have a project I’ve written a proposal for to the Object Lessons series (still waiting to hear back if it’s a go), and one on Miami in the 1920s that was inspired by my great-grandmother’s diary that will be some mashup of weird family memoir and cultural history. I have promised myself that no matter where the nearly-done monograph (on global Victorian encounters) is by November 1, I will let myself dive into the Miami project full-force at that point. I need something new and inspiring to occupy my brain, and then I’ll just tuck the last few bits of that monograph in wherever they fit. I’ve also been writing lots of short, public essays lately and pitching them around. I have one on Victorian ‘hidden mother’ photographs coming out in Aeon/Psyche in about a month. Reading this over, it sounds crazy how many things I’m working on at once, but I think that I just needed a bit of time this fall to think about lots of different possibilities for research directions before settling into a single project for much of the sabbatical. A ‘timeline cleanse’ for my brain, if you will. It will be interesting to see where things are nine months from now, but my goal is to have a book contract for one of these projects by then.”
The editors at The Words would like to thank Professors English and Kaston Tange for their thoughtful responses. We dearly miss seeing them on campus and are excited to hear more developments on their fascinating projects!