Part One: Fathers in Theory, Fathers in Praxis: Merging Work and
Parenting
Disney Dad
Amitava Kumar
Gaining a Daughter: A Father’s Transgendered Tale
Lennard J. Davis
Gifts from the Sea
David G. Campbell
The Luck of the Irish
F. D. Reeve
Shifting the Tectonic Plates of Academia
Jerald Walker
Hair-Raising Experiences
John W. Wells
A River Runs through It: Queer Theory and Fatherhood
Joseph Gelfer
On Writing and Rearing
David Haven Blake
Doing Things with Words
Ira L. Strauber
On Fecundity, Fidelity, and Expectation: Reflections on Philosophy and
Fatherhood
J. Aaron Simmons
Sheathing the Sword
Gregory Orfalea
Part Two: Family Made: The Difference of Alternative or Delayed
Fatherhood
Weighed but Found Wanting: Ten Years of Being Measured and Divided
Robert Mayer
Vespers, Matins, Lauds: The Life of a Liberal Arts College Professor
Ralph James Savarese
How White Was My Prairie
Mark Montgomery
Meniscus
Robert Gray
Once Was Lost
John Bryant
Shared Attention: Hearing Cameron’s Voice
Mark Osteen
Accidental Academic, Deliberate Dad
Kevin G. Barnhurst
Late Fatherhood among the Baptists
Andrew Hazucha
Being a Dad, Studying Fathers: Personal Reflections
William Marsiglio
Single Dad in Academia: Fatherhood and the Redemption of Scholarship
Eric H. du Plessis
Superheroes
Stanford W. Carpenter
Part Three: Forging New Fatherhoods: Ambitions Altered and Transformed
Maybe It Is Just Math: Fatherhood and Disease in Academia
Jason Thompson
Dreaming of Direction: Reconciling Fatherhood and Ambition
Mike Augspurger
Making a Home for Family and Scholarship
Ting Man Tsao
Change Is Here, but We Need to Talk about It: Reflections on Black
Fatherhood in the Academy
Jeffrey B. Leak
Vocabularies and Their Subversion: A Reminiscence
John Domini
Balancing Diapers and a Doctorate: The Adventures of a Single Dad in
Grad School
Charles Bane
It’s a Chapter-Book, Huh: Teaching, Writing, and Early Fatherhood
Alex Vernon
Pitcher This: An Academic Dad’s Award-Winning Attempt to Be in Two
Places at Once
Colin Irvine
Odd Quirks
Chris Gabbard
The Precarious Private Life of Professor Father Fiction Chef and Other
Possible Poignancies
Gary H. McCullough
Subtitle: Essays on
Fatherhood by Men in the Academy Editors:
Mary Ruth Marotte,
Paige Martin Reynolds, and Ralph James Savarese Subject:Gender
Studies / Education Paper ISBN:
978-0-8135-4879-1 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4878-4 Pages:
272 pages Publication Date: December 2010
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.
About the Author:
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.”
