Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy

Published by Rutgers University Press 2010

Papa, PhD

Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy

Edited by: Mary Ruth Marotte , Paige Reynolds and Ralph Savarese

https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813550206

Overview
Contents

About this book

It is not easy raising a family and balancing work and personal commitments in academia, regardless of gender. Parents endure the stress of making tenure with the demands of life with children. While women's careers are derailed more often than men's as a result of such competing pressures, fathers, too, experience conflicting feelings about work and home, making parenting ever more challenging.

In Papa, PhD, Mary Ruth Marotte, Paige Martin Reynolds, and Ralph James Savarese bring together a group contributors from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. They are white, black, South Asian, Asian, and Arab. They are gay and straight, married and divorced. They are tenured and untenured, at research-one universities and at community colleges. Some write at the beginning of their careers, others at the end. But, perhaps most important they do not look back-they look forward to new parental and professional synergies as they reflect on what it means to be a father in the academy.

The fathers writing in Papa, PhD seek to expand their children's horizons, giving them the gifts of better topic sentences and a cosmopolitan sensibility. They seriously consider the implications of gender theory and queer theory-even Marxist theory-and make relevant theoretical connections between their work and the less abstract, more pragmatic, world of fathering. What resonates is the astonishing range of forms that fatherhood can take as these dads challenge traditional norms by actively questioning the status quo.

Author / Editor information

Mary Ruth Marotte is an assistant professor of English and the director of graduate studies in English at the University of Central Arkansas. She is the author of Captive Bodies: American Women Writers Redefine Pregnancy and Childbirth.

Paige Martin Reynolds is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas, where she specializes in teaching and writing about early modern drama.

Ralph James Savarese teaches American literature, disability studies, and creative writing at Grinnell College. He is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, which Newsweek called a "real-life love story and a passionate manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities," and the winner of the Herman Melville Society's Hennig Cohen Prize for an "Outstanding Contribution to Melville Scholarship."

Reviews

"An interesting and well-written collection of essays on fatherhood in the academy. The authors' candid revelations about their desires for family, for work, for themselves, and how these are realized, modified, or sacrificed highlights how men are also influenced by social norms, institutional constraints, and the interpersonal relationships of family life."

— Men and Masculinities

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Thinking Stiffs: An Introduction Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Part One. Fathers in Theory, Fathers in Praxis: Merging Work and Parenting
Disney Dad Amitava Kumar Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
Gaining a Daughter: A Father’s Transgendered Tale Lennard J. Davis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	7
Gifts from the Sea David G. Campbell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	16
The Luck of the Irish F.D. Reeve Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	26
Shifting the Tectonic Plates of Academia Jerald Walker Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
Hair-Raising Experiences John W. Wells Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	34
A River Runs through It: Queer Theory and Fatherhood Joseph Gelfer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	46
On Writing and Rearing David Haven Blake Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	50
Doing Things with Words Ira L. Strauber Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
On Fecundity, Fidelity, and Expectation: Reflections on Philosophy and Fatherhood J. Aaron Simmons Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Sheathing the Sword Gregory Orfalea Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
Part Two. Family Made: The Difference of Alternative or Delayed Fatherhood
Weighed but Found Wanting: Ten Years of Being Measured and Divided Robert Mayer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
Vespers, Matins, Lauds: The Life of a Liberal Arts College Professor Ralph James Savarese Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
How White Was My Prairie Mark Montgomery Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	88
Meniscus Robert Gray Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
Once Was Lost John Bryant Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
Shared Attention: Hearing Cameron’s Voice Mark Osteen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
Accidental Academic, Deliberate Dad Kevin G. Barnhurst Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
Late Fatherhood among the Baptists Andrew Hazucha Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	128
Being a Dad, Studying Fathers: A Personal Reflection William Marsiglio Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
Single Dad in Academia: Fatherhood and the Redemption of Scholarship Eric H. Du Plessis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Superheroes Stanford W. Carpenter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	150
Part Three. Forging New Fatherhoods: Ambitions Altered and Transformed
Maybe It Is Just Math: Fatherhood and Disease in Academia Jason Thompson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Dreaming of Direction: Reconciling Fatherhood and Ambition Mike Augspurger Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	168
Making a Home for Family and Scholarship Ting Man Tsao Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	176
Change Is Here, but We Need to Talk about It: Reflections on Black Fatherhood in the Academy Jeffrey B. Leak Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	184
Vocabularies and Their Subversion: A Reminiscence John Domini Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	188
Balancing Diapers and a Doctorate: The Adventures of a Single Dad in Grad School Charles Bane Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	196
It’s a Chapter-Book, Huh: Teaching, Writing, and Early Fatherhood Alex Vernon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
Pitcher This: An Academic Dad’s Award-Winning Attempt to Be in Two Places at Once Colin Irvine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Odd Quirks Chris Gabbard Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
The Precarious Private Life of Professor Father Fiction Chef and Other Possible Poignancies Gary H. McCullough Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	224
Notes on Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231

Language: English
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 272

eBook

Published: November 3, 2010
ISBN: 9780813550206