Being a public scholar is ultimately about reciprocity, collaboration, and knowledge translation. It’s about bridging the gap between traditional academic audiences and a larger interested public who may benefit from but who may also help improve your research. As a doctoral student in a publicly funded university, I believe that at the very least the public should get better access to my research, and a jargon-laden traditional dissertation is not a very accessible document for a public audience.
Research Description
My research focuses on two early twentieth-century North American women writers, Winnifred Eaton and Laura Goodman Salverson, who wrote what is now considered “ethnic” fiction. Eaton was an Anglo-Chinese North American author born in Montreal to a white British father and a Chinese mother who wrote under the faux-Japanese pseudonym “Onoto Watanna” while claiming a fabricated Japanese American identity for much of her career. Later in life, and after stints in Hollywood, she moved to Alberta, rebranding herself as “Winnifred Reeve,” a rancher’s wife and Canadian literary nationalist. Laura Goodman Salverson was an Icelandic Canadian author best known for her Norse-inspired fiction and her sympathetic depictions of Scandinavian and German immigrants in North America. Though Eaton and Salverson come from different backgrounds, there are several similarities in the trajectory of Eaton and Salverson’s careers that reveal how they negotiate their claimed ethnic heritage in North American settler-colonial contexts and provide case studies for the ways in which ethnic settlers sometimes utilized their ethnic identities to support the Anglo-Saxonism that undergirds a North American national identity. Eaton and Salverson are two contentious, non-canonical figures whose nuanced identity formulations both challenge and uphold notions of empire, nation, and race. They provide fertile ground for examining how these notions work themselves out in the early formation of a national Canadian literature. My project includes the creation of an open access digital archive of Laura Goodman Salverson’s works and a range of public engagements in Calgary in 2023 to accompany the Winnifred Eaton Conference “Onoto Watanna’s Cattle at 100: Indomitable Women in the West During the Chinese Exclusion Era,” including a curated film screening, an exhibit of her works at the Reeve Theatre, live research-creation performances, and more.
What does being a Public Scholar mean to you?
For me, being a public scholar is ultimately about reciprocity, collaboration, and knowledge translation. It’s about bridging the gap between traditional academic audiences and a larger interested public who may benefit from but who may also help improve your research. As a doctoral student in a publicly funded university, I believe that at the very least the public should get better access to my research, and a jargon-laden traditional dissertation is not a very accessible document for a public audience. New media technologies like podcasts and websites, digital or physical exhibits, and other kinds of public engagements provide ample opportunity to reframe and translate research topics for a wider, interested public and invite them into a conversation about it.
In what ways do you think the PhD experience can be re-imagined with the Public Scholars Initiative?
In my field, we know there are more PhDs produced every year than there are academic jobs on the market yet our doctoral training prepares us exclusively for those academic careers. It is a valuable endeavor to undertake the PhD for the sole purpose of creating new knowledge. It is also valuable to imagine ways of putting new knowledge to use for the benefit of society and the public good. These are not mutually exclusive. The Public Scholars Initiative is helping to re-imagine and validate the more public-facing iterations of academic knowledge through its interdisciplinary networking and career training opportunities and by funding the kinds of projects that might not otherwise come to fruition in a traditional academic environment.
How do you envision connecting your PhD work with broader career possibilities?
I am interested broadly in the way we construct our culture narratives and how we tell our stories, and I care deeply about social justice. My values informed my decision to pursue the PhD and those same values will inform how I put my PhD to use. My research prepares me for all kinds of work within and beyond the academy. I’d love to be a director of public programming at an academic or cultural institution who conceives and plans meaningful public engagements. I could do curatorial or consulting work for museums, art galleries, and other kinds of cultural institutions. My PhD helps prepare me for work in nonprofits and/or in grant writing. Branding, marketing, and communications are all about organizational storytelling, and I can put those skills to work for organizations that align with my values. There are endless possibilities.
How does your research engage with the larger community and social partners?
My work connects to a number of cultural institutions and community practitioners who enrich the project. I am working with family descendants who have archival materials and family knowledge I wouldn’t otherwise have access to and community storytellers and public historians in Calgary who have local connections and relationships with local cultural groups that they generously share. Like Salverson, I am also a Western Icelander, so I am working on a figure who has historical significance for my own diasporic community.
Why did you decide to pursue a graduate degree?
To be perfectly honest, I wanted to challenge myself and feel accomplished for having achieved such a lofty goal for myself. I am a first-generation student and the first woman in my family to get a graduate degree. In high school I never even knew somebody with a PhD let alone imagined I’d go to university at all.
Why did you choose to come to British Columbia and study at UBC?
I had been to Vancouver once before and loved the weather (I'm allergic to the sun). I was impressed by the UBC Arts PhD Co-op Program. My department often ranks among the top 20 in the world. But the truth is I did not believe I’d get into UBC, and I only applied three days before the deadline as a shot in the dark at the persistent urging of a previous professor and mentor. UBC accepted me with a generous funding package that made it financially possible for me to uproot my life and move to a new country. It was only once I got here that I found my wonderfully supportive supervisor, Dr. Mary Chapman, who has been an incredible mentor for me.
