I understand my responsibility as a humanist to extend beyond my role as an instructor and researcher, and to include institutional service and campus community development. Duke University is a wealthy private university largely isolated from its surrounding historically Black town suffering from class and racial segregation. As a first-generation student myself, teaching and studying in this environment has made connecting with my surrounding community both crucial and challenging. I have deliberately sought out opportunities to engage in community outreach because it was essential to my personal investment with my scholarly identity.  

One early and formative experience of applying my humanist training outside the boundaries of my program occurred while working at Duke University’s writing studio. On campus, the studio’s main focus is on consulting with writers at the university, particularly enrolled undergraduate and graduate students. But there was one program—short-lived because of lack of funding—that I would be interested in emulating or expanding. For a time, the studio partnered with the Emily K Center, a nonprofit organization in Durham, North Carolina, that builds on the academic, career, and leadership potential of students who are traditionally underrepresented in higher education from kindergarten through college. The writing studio provided a certain number of hours per week where a consultant would travel to the Emily K Center to host brief consultations with community members on any piece of writing—whether a college application essay, a resume, or a creative piece. The time would also be open to anyone in the community, so children and adults of all ages would come in to get help on whatever they were working on. As consultants affiliated with Duke, we would rely on the resources, handouts, and consultation strategies we developed in-house.

The collaboration effort with the Emily K Center was impactful for two reasons: first, the Durham community was granted free, regular, and accessible writing support from trained humanists; and second, we, the consultants, were introduced to a different audience, and consequently made to learn how to adapt our academic pedagogy to a non-academic audience. I could imagine such a program being revived at an existing writing studio, or even before that, a pilot program of the same type reaching out to staff and service employees on campus.

My personal development as a researcher and instructor is invigorated by my service to my home institution at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 2014, I co-organized the Global Cultural Studies Symposium with Dr. Robyn Wiegman—a day-long event geared toward connecting undergrads, grads, faculty, and staff outside of the classroom. The event included a pedagogy workshop for graduate students, a lunch social, a panel discussion by undergrads, and a plenary presenting new faculty research. Our goal was to showcase the broad knowledge base and analytical skills that would prepare undergrads for leadership roles in the 21st century.

I was so inspired by the vibrant setting of the undergraduate symposium that I went on to co-organize the Graduate Program in Literature’s quarterly colloquium series. At each colloquium, a current graduate student presented an overview of their work, a chosen respondent provided feedback on a piece of writing distributed beforehand, and then the conversation opened up to an interdisciplinary audience. I created a dedicated space for graduate students in my program to engage with and share their developing work with graduate and faculty colleagues across campus. During my tenure as coordinator, I encouraged presenters to, for the first time, bring non-academic respondents from the Durham community. One presenter invited the founder of a local grassroots organization focusing on disenfranchised Black and Brown voters to respond to their work on the Black Panther movement. The result was an engaging discussion on how the author’s vocabulary and archive might be modified to target a more non-academic audience interested in using such a history in the political education of new organizers.

I have also created opportunities to lead and serve the Duke University community beyond my program. For several years, I have worked within Duke University toward the mission of making workplaces safer environments for graduate students and employees. My advocacy work always prioritizes the values of restorative justice, which centers the voices of marginalized people to build positive community relationships, establishes shared values, and fosters cooperative learning as methods of social repair. To this end, I organized and chaired a series of “Know Your Rights” workshops to educate my peers on ways available for addressing misconduct, as well as provide information on how to support one another as bystanders and advocates. The outcome of my work has been long-lasting collaborations between graduate students, faculty, and campus staff members in the development of more equitable campus misconduct policies.