SJSU recently began a program whereby full time faculty could apply for release time to work on research projects — this would equate to a single course release for each semester over 5 years. That means my current 3/4 teaching load would be reduced to 2/3. This is unheard of in the CSU system, but it was a timely recognition that SJSU and the CSU is going to require faculty to produce scholarship, the administration needs to support that requirement with actual funding — though, let’s be honest, one course release per semester while still teaching multiple preps and working on a variety of administrative and curricular project still doesn’t afford enough time to write a book without using up all of the unpaid summer months to get a bulk of the work done.
But, it’s progress.
While on sabbatical, I got word of this first round of applications and sent off a massive dream projects that would be accomplished in stages. After having written a monograph, edited a critical edition, and tackled a behemoth collaborative project, I knew exactly how I wanted to perform this type of scholarly communication with the most impact – publishing open access, online journals instead of spending all of my time drafting a monograph for print distribution. With all of the issues surrounding our library funding, I don’t want to publish in journals that our library can’t even afford to subscribe to; nor do I want to publish in print journals that aren’t part of the ProQuest index of articles. All of this is about access and dissemination of scholarship. I’m simultaneously working internally to promote these open access journals as equivalent to print journals (it’s been a very long road event still).
My project has been profoundly influenced by my interactions with scholars and students at a conference in Australia and another meeting in South Africa during Summer/Fall 2019. This RSCA 5-Year project is a result of that privilege of sabbatical and the multitude of conversations that I had with those working in British Romanticism and 19th-century print culture that outside the white, male dominated canon — the meetings were eye-opening, to say the least.
One of the first steps in the project was to bring this revised set of scholarly ideas to the MA English graduate students in a course entitled, #Bigger 6: Decolonizing British Romantic Literature (1775-1835) through Print Culture (Engl. 232). Read more…
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was our playground. And, we got special dispensation to
