Professors Are Cool People, Too, revived and reimagined after five years, explores the humanity and personalities of English professors. Host, English alum, and former student worker Pascale Joachim investigates what makes our professors tick and why studying English is so cool. In this season, Pascale chats with Darcie Dennigan, Debapriya Sarkar, and Grégory Pierrot. Listen now!
Listen to Episode 1
[Chopin Waltz No. 11 in G Flat Major, Op. 70 No. 1 plays in background]
Hello everyone! My name is Pascale Joachim, and welcome to season 3 of what I’m unofficially going to call Professors are Cool People, too. A minor rebrand that’s connected to my personal experience as a student worker for the English Department here at UConn.
So, a little bit about me: I’ve been working for this Department since my freshman year, I’m now a senior, and throughout this time, I’ve heard about some really fascinating projects and publications English professors from all of our campuses are involved in. I knew I had to do what I can to showcase [00:30] just how cool our professors are, and this podcast is the perfect platform to do just that.
That said, on our roster for this season, we have Professor Darcie Dennigan at our Storrs campus, Professor Debapriya Sarkar at Avery Point, and Professor Grégory Pierrot at Stamford. I’m super excited to chat with each of them about their backgrounds, their research, what guides them in the classroom, and most importantly the cool person behind the profession.
I hope these conversations highlight the interdisciplinary nature of what too many people assume is a limited [01:00] area of study. Yes, we’re still talking about English. I mean, what else could connect poetry, plays, maritime studies, the environment, music, and revolutionary studies?
As an English major myself, I’m especially looking forward to bragging about what I consider to be one of the coolest majors out there, and I hope by the end of this season, I can get a couple more people to agree with me.
I’ll end with a shoutout Professor Sean Forbes for working closely with me and helping me with this podcast, Ali Oshinskie, host of the previous two [01:30] seasons, give them a listen if you haven’t, for sharing a wealth of knowledge and resources with me, and the English Department at UConn for trusting me to represent them. This should be a lot of fun, and I’m excited to share these conversations with you.
Listen to Episode 2
[Feels Blind by Bikini Kill fades in]
PJ: Hello everyone, I’m Pascale, and welcome to Professors are Cool People, too. For this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Associate Professor in Residence, Darcie Dennigan, located at our Storrs campus. I’ve never taken a course with Professor Dennigan, but I always sensed something deeply authentic about her.
Needless to say, I was super excited to chat with her and I’m even more excited for you all to hear what we talked about.
[Feels Blind fades out]
Professor Dennigan was hired to teach creative writing here at UConn back in 2010, and one of her favorite courses to teach is a nature writing workshop. To get a sense of what this class is like, here’s a line from her course description. “Be prepared for non-linear, challenging writing assignments and for invitations to meet a blank page without constraints.
“A piece of literal garbage will be the linchpin of all of your writing for the first third of the semester, and a pile of dirt will anchor your writing in the second third. How are you inextricably linked to this trash, this dirt? What is the loop you’re living in, and how are you continuously fed back into this loop?”
DD: You know, I was hired as a poet, and to teach creative writing, and I would not call myself a nature poet in the classical sense, and they needed someone to teach nature writing once the person who had been doing it for so long and was so great at it retired. I was just terrified. And um, I’m still pretty terrified, but it’s the class where I am learning as I go and teaching myself so much.
And it’s the class that is filtered into my writing the most, so that I would say that I’ve written things that could be classified, loosely, as a kind of nature writing, and that’s totally due to having to teach this class. And I think it’s, you know, it’s the single biggest issue facing humanity. Uh, so, you know, it’s nice to be able to talk about it every time we come to class and not just talk about it but to think about different ways of thinking, different words we can use, different grammar we can use like to, like, address that problem at the level of language, which is what writers can do.
PJ: Professor Dennigan actually went to college to study French, but later decided she wanted to pursue acting. Both of these paths didn’t necessarily pan out for her.
DD: I loved French, but um, then I decided I wanted to be an actress and so I left college and went to acting school.
And then I, long story short, kind of got kicked out of acting school because I had a terrible Rhode Island accent and flunked.
PJ: So why did you choose to study English and why did you pursue an MFA in poetry?
DD: I just, I did English only because reading and writing had always just sort of been there and been like a very large part of my life.
Um, I hadn’t thought that could be something I studied, I just thought that was, like, my life. But it turned out the best professors were there, or at least in my opinion at UMass, the best professors were there and so I kept wanting to take their classes.
Yeah, so it was sort of by default, although I’m really happy because, um, unlike the French and the theater classes, and other classes, the English classes were also my most challenging. And I can’t say, I can’t tell you any fact I learned in college, but I remember, I remember learning how to write and think in different ways. Even though I have no facts, just methods.
Um, I was really lonely after college, and so it’s really my mom’s fault. She got me a gift certificate to take a community writing class in Boston. And, that was it.
In college, I had taken a creative writing class, but the teacher was incredibly authoritarian and basically told me, you know, “your poems are terrible, if you have to write, make sure you stick to fiction because I can’t read another one of your poems.” And you know, and I was like, sure, okay, great. You know, I was like, you know, whatever. I was like a typical, female undergrad, like smiling, nodding, “thank you sir, for telling me how terrible I am,” you know?
Um, but I took this class in Boston with this teacher, Emily Taylor, who I don’t know, I just fell in love with her. She wore, like, the same weird dress that seemed like it was made of drapes. She had incredibly hairy armpits, and she was like one of the first women I had, like, ever come in contact with who was, like, so herself. She had memorized, it seemed like, every poem in the world. I don’t know, I think I just had, like, a huge poet’s crush on her.
And also I felt like, oh, I could talk to these people in this class. Like, you know, they’re all different ages. But anyway, I fell in love with writing poems and [05:00] yeah, I just kind of went on some steam until I could get into an MFA program. Took a couple years, but yeah.
PJ: So you, would you say that professor was very influential in your choice to pursue graduate school?
DD: Yes, and she wasn’t a professor. She was, um, she couldn’t have been more than 25 herself. She had just finished an MFA program and for money, she was teaching, you know, this community poetry class in Arlington, Mass. Um, but I think she was just so in love with poetry and um, also just, you know, very encouraging.
There was only, like, four of us in the class, but she brought in all these poems for me to read. I’d never really read, you know, I read like the Fairy Queen and The Canterbury Tales in college, I hadn’t really read any contemporary stuff. Um, so I think so, I think she really was.
And I also had another teacher, I took another community writing workshop, um, at Harvard Extension School. And that teacher, um, while sort of anti-MFA, like in terms of like anti, like, poetry establishment, institutional affiliation. Even though he was teaching at Harvard, [laughs] um, he was really, really incredibly supportive as well.
PJ: That’s great. Um, so I looked at your CV [laughs] and I noticed that you’ve taught at Roger Williams, URI, Brown, and RISD, but what specifically drew you to UConn?
DD: Honestly, this was a full-time job and the others were adjunct jobs and it’s incredibly difficult to be an adjunct. Um, you know, I have two young kids and I’m a single parent and it’s hard to have your schedule up in the air like that and not know if you’re gonna get classes. So I’m really grateful to have a full-time job at UConn.
Um, but I can also say that having taught at a bunch of other places, I really like the students here. I think just the range of students, the range of experiences they bring to bear on their writing and reading. Um, they’re also really ready to experiment, which is not at every school, I can say for sure.
PJ: Professor Dennigan also enjoys teaching Modern Drama and engaging with students in their independent studies. She’s been approached with poetry chapbooks, YA novels, and textual adaptations of artwork. Talk to me about these courses.
DD: I mean, I’m also not qualified to teach it, but love it. And I absolutely am in love with the absurdist, I love absurdist playwrights. Um, and I just, I absolutely love that I can teach Ubu Roi the, um, Alfred Jarry play, um, which is just, you know, basically like a takeoff on Macbeth with, like, a lot of bathroom humor. I love all of the plays that I get to share in there. I love learning. I mean, honestly, I love learning about these things that, you know, I don’t have a PhD in them, but I love them.
And having to teach is like a crash course in these certain things, you know? You know, so yeah. So I guess those are the two classes that, like, make me sweat the most, but also, um, I’m like so appreciative that I have the opportunity to do them. Because teaching like Intro to Creative Writing I love, I really love, but like I can do that and I know I can do that.
Whereas these classes, like I never know if I’m gonna be able to do it, but I love the challenge of it. And, um, yeah, I love what students write in both of the classes.
PJ: And independent studies?
DD: You know, it’s like, it’s really student driven and, uh, in a class it’s instructor driven in that the instructor writes the syllabus and so the syllabus can, you know, change and respond to student interests, but it’s primarily initiated by the instructor.
In an independent study, it’s totally initiated by the student. You know, they come to you with what they wanna study and like I can say, okay, you know what, have you thought about these people? Or, we could read these people together.
But, so I’m doing one with a graduate student right now, um, who’s writing this book of essays. But, you know, and I suggested some books, but ultimately, like she made the reading list, or together we made it. I’m not there to give her assignments in any way, but I’m there as a sounding board, I’m there as, like, a person who can help with accountability, which I think writers at every level need – you never not need accountability.
Um, and I’m also there for, you know, for feedback, um, which is all, you know, important. I don’t think that any one person should be the end-all-be-all when it comes to feedback, but I can be one source of regular feedback.
PJ: So generally speaking, regarding your, I guess, teaching philosophy, teaching principle, like, what do you hope students walk away with after completing a course with you? Whether it’s the independent study, nature writing, like any of those courses?
DD: We were just talking about this in my nature writing class because I share a bunch of students with another professor who [10:00] I really love and I’m friends with, but we have a totally different approach because this person has excellent criticism and brings the excellent criticism to class and gives that criticism to the writers.
And, um, I am really against that model because, I mean, especially for undergrads, I’m really against that model. Um, because I think that it’s so awesome to sit there and have someone tell you what’s wrong with a piece of writing, it feels so good. It’s like, oh, thank God, you know? But I also think that it’s too easy and the first thing you need to do as a writer is to hear how other people are describing your work back to you.
And then figure out, like, what is wrong? You know, because when you hear, when you hear the disconnect between what you were going for and what people are experiencing, then you know, like, okay, this wasn’t, this didn’t come across. Um, but I think to tell a student that, is like, it helps their writing and their work get a lot better really fast, but it doesn’t ultimately help them when they’ve left UConn, I guess, because then it’s like, okay, who’s gonna tell me what’s wrong?
Um, and I, you know, I want them to have a sense of what a writing process can be for themselves. You know, like what is their process like? Because I think until you actually, like, know what your process is, writing is just gonna keep being, like, daunting.
But once you actually know, like, okay, I know, I know my first five drafts always suck, so it’s okay, like, I can write them, I, I just have to like, keep living with it ‘cause usually on the sixth something clicks or, you know, like I know that like I need some kind of routine or whatever. So I want them to know a process, um, whether it’s critical writing or creative writing.
Um, and I want them to be able to figure out some distance from their own work and sort of like, know the difference between, like, revising and editing, like I feel like revising is like really messing with it and editing is like what any, like, proofreader could do, you know? And who cares about that? You know, it’s like we have spell check and stuff for that, you know. Um, so I want them to do that.
And I think I also just want them to investigate the ways that they read and their prejudices they bring to reading. And, um, I mean everything. I also want them to write something that really surprises them, that they love. I want them to read something that they wanna go back to at some point in their lives.
You know, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna analyze anything to death. I want to just get them interested enough and asking enough questions that they would go back to it, whether it’s in another class or grad school or just, you know, sitting on a train when they’re 32, you know, with the book in their lap.
PJ: Um, so slight, redirect, focusing more on you as a writer. You mentioned, or I’ve noticed that you’ve written plays, adaptations, essays, poems, novels. So can you just talk about what each style of writing offers you and what do you appreciate about each of those different styles of writing?
DD: I don’t really break it up in my head like that. Um, I think of myself as a poet and sometimes it comes out in other ways. Uh, like I was just reading this, this piece by the writer Anne Boyer, where she says like, she doesn’t like the term lyric essay, and I won’t go into everything she says, but I totally get that because I’m like, yes. It’s like making it its own genre when like any good piece of writing has elements of poetry in it, blah, blah, blah. I won’t go into my whole screed on that.
But, um, but I, yeah, I guess like I, I think of myself as a poet and, you know, it comes out in, in different ways. Um, yeah, like I wrote a novel, but I, I even tried to get the publisher to say it was a poet’s novel because I really did think I was just operating with poetic constraints in prose.
Um, however I can say that I think theater and particularly poet’s theater, which I’ve been doing a lot, is different because it’s collaborative, unserious in a way that sometimes literary publishing can feel much more serious. And so it’s, it’s really important, then really important to me to do these, like, poet’s theater things where I take other people’s books of poems and, like, kind of translate them for the stage.
Um, it’s important because it’s always completely amateur. Um, and it feels really good and important to be an amateur. Um, it’s always like improvisational, um, kind of ad hoc, um, full of mistakes. Um, but serious, like we’re taking it seriously, but it is, you know. Um, and also that it’s collaborative that, like, you can’t really control anything from beginning [15:00] to end.
Um, that sometimes meaning really isn’t made until there’s an audience, that the audience has to complete the meaning in a way that is really cool to see.
PJ: I don’t know about you all, but I’m not entirely familiar with the mechanics of poetry. So I asked Professor Dennigan to delve a little deeper into the idea of a ‘poet’s play’ or a ‘poet’s novel.’
DD: You asked me the hardest question. Um, you know, well, so for example, in Slater Orchard, the novel, I decided that one thing that irks me somewhat about some fiction is that people just use words like, just easily, like abundantly, like as if they’re just everywhere and just no problem. Um, I decided in that book that if I used a word, whatever word seemed most important on a page then the next page I would have to investigate the etymology of it and the resonances of it, but within the plot.
So the whole thing was sort of like an etymological, like, discourse. And I wouldn’t let myself just go off where I wanted to unless it could follow the etymology. Um, so constraints I think are the province of poetry, but other things too.
Um, but I, I do think that in poetry, language drives it, language and rhythm more than anything. Like, more than character, more than plot, you know, um, it’s language.
PJ: We also talked a little bit about writers dabbling in different forms of literature.
DD: There are these two poets, um, who are actually a couple, Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop.
They’re both in their eighties, late eighties, and, um, they’re both really, incredibly great poets and translators. Um, I know Keith won a Pulitzer, Rosemarie has won a lot of awards in multiple countries.
Um, I love, I really love her poems. I love both of their poems. I learned, they live in Providence, and I learned when I moved to Providence that they had this poets’ theater troupe in the seventies.
And I was like, “Them? They’re like poetry royalty,” you know, like they’re so serious. And I asked them about it and they just were, like, laughing when I asked them about it. And it was just about like their friends and trying stuff out. And I think that all the theater stuff that I’m doing is much more about just my friends and having fun and being collaborative in a way with literature that is not, um, nothing you could ever win an award for or get famous for, and it’s good, yeah.
PJ: Professor Dennigan shared that plays are currently her favorite projects because they’re “new and therefore miraculous.” What draws you to plays in playwriting?
DD: As I mentioned, I, I didn’t study playwriting or theater beyond going to a year of acting school and being asked to not come back. Uh, so I’m not trained in it and I sort of been trying to write plays for like decades, but, like, they never, you know, they never really got anywhere. Mostly ‘cause nothing happened. Mostly because I’m 100% uninterested in plot.
But I think I was finally exposed to other kinds of plays and performance art, where plot is also not primary and completely fell in love with them. Not that there’s no plot, but um, a writer like Adrienne Kennedy, she’s a playwright, but she’s also not as well known for it, but also a poet.
Her plays are kind of like mindscapes, or people call them like nightmare-scapes or dreamscapes. But you know, there’s a lot of repetition. One character will have several names and several sort of like incarnations. There’s absolutely impossible stage directions, like, you know, “ravens are circling the ceiling” and things like that.
Um, so she’s like really not conscious of the play taking place, like, in a real theater. They really are taking place in, in a mind. So like her most famous play, Funny House of a Negro, which is one that we read in, um, Modern Drama. So in terms of plot, like what happens, maybe one thing happens, maybe, which I won’t say because if anything does happen, it’s on the last page.
Um, but it’s, I mean, Adrienne Kennedy’s, like, the most brilliant writer. I think she’s our best living playwright for sure. She has a play on Broadway right now actually, which is like, her first play was, like, 1964 on Broadway and now she has one in 2023? Like, it’s amazing. Anyway, I’m just shouting out, everyone should go see.
Um, but reading people like her made me see, like, there’s other ways to write plays and so, you know, and, um, I’m, it just feels like a miracle to be able to make things that [20:00] can be voiced by other people, um, that are not exactly poems, but also work a lot like poems.
PJ: I think now would be a good time to plug a blurb from her course description for Modern Drama.
“Why study modern and postmodern, absurdist, surrealist, dadaesque, non-naturalistic plays? One, to be okay with not knowing. Two, to engage in nonsense in the pursuit of sense. Studying these texts in their historical, political, and philosophical contexts will highlight the absurdity of humanity, and only if we can recognize our absurdity, can we celebrate the possibility of non-absurdity.
“And three, to gather courage to go on with your life. Here comes another year, another semester, another day.”
Currently, Professor Dennigan is working on a libretto for a sung through musical that’s about bringing to life the situations in the paintings of, I’m going to say this name wrong and I apologize, Artemesia Gentileschi. Gentileschi was a renaissance artist who broke several barriers for female Caravaggio painters during the 17th century. Professor Dennigan finds her work to be relevant and evocative.
DD: She did these paintings, you know, at the time, like they’d often reinterpret biblical myths, for instance.
She has these paintings of, you know, somewhat common figures. So, um, the figure of Judith, who, you know, in biblical literature, uh, beheaded, um, I’m not gonna say his name right, Holofernes. And most like Caravaggio and like other painters, um, they don’t necessarily depict Judith doing this act in, like, maybe a realistic way.
They, maybe they make her beautiful or they make her like daintily looking away from the blood or, you know, but, but [Gentileschi] has this painting where she’s, like, straddling him and digging the knife in and she’s having like a, a, um, maid servant help her do it. And they’re like, very much, like, in the act of murder.
Um, and she has other paintings about murder. She has a painting, um, again, like a biblical story of Susanna in the Garden. And the elders come and they, everyone loves Susanna and she’s really beautiful. And the elders are like, “Have sex with us, and if you do, haha, you’re defiled, and if you don’t, we’re gonna tell everyone you did.”
And you know, and so, and people have painted her for centuries too, but [Gentileschi’s] Susanna is like, it’s like so powerful because she’s like, has this look on her face that I think a lot of women will recognize, which is like, I don’t wanna say yes, and I can’t say no. Like this is such a dangerous position. And she doesn’t have the like…most depictions are like, “I’m super sexy,” or, you know, and, and her, you know, it’s just, it feels, they feel so contemporary.
They feel like, “oh my God, I, this was my friend, you know, in, in college or, you know, and this happened to her.”
PJ: I was curious as to why and how Professor Dennigan came to Artemesia’s paintings and here’s what she shared with me. “I came to Artemesia because I am, for lack of a better word, angry. Frustratingly angry about male violence. It’s close to home and nearly everywhere I look. It’s our template. Artemesia Gentileschi’s work offers this fantasy of female revenge through paintings like Judith Beheading Holofernes. I love her depictions of the story because in them, the women are working together and are strong and committed to their acts. The revenge is the fantasy, but the strength is real.”
Professor Dennigan’s favorite piece by Gentileschi is Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting. I found the painting to not only be beautiful and a testament to Gentileschi’s talent, but reminiscent of the kind of teacher and woman Professor Dennigan is. I think it’s pretty cool, which is why I chose to use the painting for the cover of this episode.
To be the painter and the muse is an ideal form of strength, as Dennigan put it, and I found this paralleled her own ability to be a professor while remaining open and curious.
So thinking outside of your work, out of academics, outside of UConn, like you as Darcie Dennigan, if there was one thing you could get more people to care about, what would it be?
DD: One thing that comes to mind, because I don’t know about you, you know, in the middle of like all the dailiness of work and family and cleaning the cat litter box, which should have happened like last week, you know, like a middle of all the dailiness, it’s like very hard to think like, what is something I can do that would be like even the tiniest drop in, like, the oceans of misery.
But I, I think a lot about people caught in the prison system and there’s a program in Providence, um, well, it’s a national program, Black and Pink, where you can write letters to, um, to prisoners who identify, um, as queer in some way. Um, because they’re often targeted, you know, in prisons. And I found out about it because they have this, like, holiday card writing thing [25:00] where you just go and you can write holiday cards to anyone who signs up for Black and Pink.
I was like, oh, this is like, I could do this. And so anyway, you can have, like, a pen pal. Um, but the more that I, the more that I read about it and the more that I get involved, you know, obviously, um, I would tend toward, like, prison abolition.
But um, like it’s so easy to not think about something that we don’t see and don’t interact with. And prisons used to be like in cities where, like, you could – there’s this really great Grace Paley story and you know, she’s in the prison for some kind of protest, but it’s like in the village, in the East Village or Greenwich Village, and they can, like, yell down to their families. And it used to be like you couldn’t ignore it.
And now it’s just like, like so many things, like landfills, you don’t see them and you can ignore them. So I think to just think about the prison system, but also to think if there’s like…it’s so easy to write a letter, you know, and people really need contact. But it’s like one of the easiest things I think we could do that might help somebody that would otherwise be invisible to us.
PJ: So our last question is a quick rapid fire section.
DD: Oh, boy. [Laughs]. Alright, I’ll be short. I’ll be really short. Okay. Yeah.
PJ: So I’ll just, like, one question first thing that comes to your mind. Okay.
DD: Okay. All right, Pascale wow.
PJ: Ready?
DD: Maybe.
PJ: Okay. So, favorite poem?
[Pause]
DD: First thing that comes to mind. Oh God. Okay. Yeah. All right. I got it. I got it. Hirimo Itō, Killing Kanoko.
PJ: Favorite city?
DD: Los Angeles.
PJ: Favorite poet.
DD: Living?
PJ: Or, deceased.
DD: Well, I’m gonna definitely say Hiromi Itō because she’s definitely my favorite living poet. I have a lot of dead ones, but yeah.
PJ: Do you have any dead ones that you wanna mention?
DD: Brigit Pegeen Kelly.
PJ: Okay. Um, favorite play?
DD: Um, I mean, I’ll definitely say an Adrienne Kennedy one since I already talked about her, but which one? Maybe? Uh, yeah. Okay. The Owl Answers by Adrienne Kennedy.
PJ: Okay. Um, favorite cuisine/favorite food?
DD: Korean.
PJ: Nice. Um, I’m assuming favorite playwright is Adrienne.
DD: Um, living?
[Feels Blind by Bikini Kill begins to fade back in]
PJ: Yeah.
DD: Yeah. Yeah.
PJ: Deceased?
DD: Uh, Eugène Ionesco.
PJ: Last one, favorite color?
DD: Green.
PJ: Nice.
DD: What’s your favorite color?
PJ: Brown.
DD: Brown?
PJ: Yeah.
DD: All shades or do you have a particular?
PJ: Specifically like Hershey Chocolate Brown, like that stereotypical brown color? Yeah, for sure. I also like gray a lot, like Heather Gray. Yeah.
I love talking with Professor Dennigan. Something I’ve always appreciated about English faculty here at UConn is their willingness to learn and grow. They genuinely enjoy working with and take a real interest in their students, and I found Professor Dennigan to be a perfect example of that.
I think it takes a lot to be consistently introspective, and I think in addition to being refreshingly real and human, Professor Dennigan embodies these traits naturally.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Professors Are Cool People, Too. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed producing it, and I’ll catch you in the next one.
Listen to Episode 3
[Ambwa Ki Chhaiyan Mein by Shubha Mudgal fades in]
PJ: Hello everyone, I’m Pascale, and welcome to Professors are Cool People, Too. For this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Assistant Professor Debapriya Sarkar. Professor Sarkar teaches at our Avery Point campus, and I think her research shines a light on the potential for English to serve as a foundation for all kinds of scholarship.
[Ambwa Ki Chhaiyan Mein by Shubha Mudgal fades out]
I was surprised to discover that Professor Sarkar received her first degree in electrical engineering. When making the choice to pursue English literature, it was her curiosity for where scientific ideas come from that motivated her.
DS: So I had always been interested in the longer history of how science works, rather than only what we can do scientifically at this moment. And so while my training was in the applied sciences, I felt there was a huge gap in my understanding of how these knowledge systems came to be.
So when I had the opportunity while doing my master’s, I ended up taking classes in the history of science and then, like, early literature. And from there, it kind of went organically, and I realized that there were other ways to explore the relations between science and other ways of knowing, and that’s what led me to do a graduate degree in English literature, um, and specifically in Renaissance literature.
PJ: Professor Sarkar found that English served as the best foundation for all of the areas of study that interested her. When she came to UConn in 2017, Avery Point stood out because it facilitated the sort of interdisciplinary work she was doing.
DS: So, I think at the very basic level, like when we read texts in an English class or in any, like, literature class, we are developing our ways of thinking, right? How do we interpret ideas? How do we engage with texts? Um, and that goes beyond the content of what we are reading, which is the literary text.
But there is also a long history, um, in which literature was understood to serve as a mediator between different disciplines like philosophy and history. So, while the philosopher works with very abstract concepts and the historian works with particular examples, um, there’s an argument that literature worked with both, or combined both.
So, in some ways, literature is a good meeting place for a variety of interdisciplinary interests in the humanities today, so, that is also why I think studying literary texts and working with literary texts prepares us to engage with a wider variety of works and to think differently with them as the situation demands.
PJ: Some of Professor Sarkar’s favorite courses to teach are Poetry and Literature and the Environment. Poetry because in it, students get to work closely with language and sound in a way that’s not always possible with other genres. In her course description for this class, Sarkar writes, “Our aim will be twofold. To become better readers and interpreters of poetry, and to explore how our understanding of poetic forms and techniques can enhance our enjoyment of reading poetry.”
DS: Um, I love teaching poetry because students both know how to recognize a poem, but also are not always conversant in being able to talk about poetry.
And it’s kind of just a very rewarding journey to help them think through, like, all the ways in which a poem is crafted. And where the crafting of a work is so deliberate and so intentional. And, many of my students are interested in creative writing, in being poets and writers, and oftentimes they do not think about the amount of effort it goes into knowing poetic forms, poetic histories – that writing poetry means you should be able to read poetry well.
And this is what, like, generations of poets have done, and this is something that I really enjoy seeing them, um, think about their own writing and their own craft as they’re reading and working with a range of poets.
PJ: Additionally, Sarkar finds Literature and the Environment rewarding because students get to discuss what they are passionate about and explore intersections between racial and environmental justice.
[5:00] Some governing questions for the class include: “What responsibility does literature have to the environment? How does evolving knowledge about the natural world intersect with ethical, social, and political issues? How does fiction shape ideas about power, policy, and change? How can the fantastic, utopian, and poetic worlds help us grapple with pressing environmental issues, such as climate crisis, access to natural resources, and global environmental inequality? How does literature use abstract notions like ‘nature’ and ‘the Anthropocene’ to complicate our ideas of race, gender, disability, and class?”
DS: Um, the Literature and the Environment class, um, as you gestured towards earlier, is perfect for this campus. Um, I teach in the maritime studies program. A lot of students here are in the marine sciences program. They’re really interested in thinking about environment and place. And we have a chance to think about those issues, like, what does it mean being situated on a campus that is by the shore?
And we can read a lot of works on the coasts and think about that. And so there is, like, always an element of the place that we are in built into the literature that we’re studying. And so it’s that kind of thing that excites me about teaching that course in particular.
And I think that also draws in a lot of students who are interested in thinking about climate change, climate justice, environmental justice, into that course, um, yeah, beyond just literary studies.
PJ: I think Avery Point is a perfect example of how locale affects thinking and the sorts of questions students might have regarding the environment and their role in it.
Outside of the classroom, Professor Sarkar is one of the co-organizers for the Humanities and Science Speaker Series. Their goal is to reflect on the changing contours of the relationships between the humanities and the sciences over a broad historical period.
DS: Yeah, it’s one of those ideas I think that just came together through conversations with colleagues.
One of my maritime studies colleagues, Helen Rozwadowski, is a historian of science. We’ve been talking about the intersections between literature and science and the history of science ever since I came to UConn, and the other co-organizer, Alexis Boylan, is an art historian, and she’s interested in thinking about knowledge, science, and visual culture.
So we’ve been talking about that, and the three of us decided that we would form this working group and see where it went. So we just started, um, doing reading groups that involved, um, UConn faculty and grad students. And then, uh, we expanded it to invite a regional faculty from campuses across the tri-state area to give talks and meet with, um, the members of the working group.
So that’s where the group has been, basically since the pandemic started. We would like to think about ways of expanding that. Maybe doing more works-in-progress in which we, members of the group, share their ways of working on the history of science, which is like such a broad term. And like, so it would be interesting to see where that goes and we can read each other’s work and learn from journalists and artists and literary scholars and historians. So that’s the hope for the next steps.
PJ: When I discovered Professor Sarkar’s involvement in this project, I had to ask her for her opinion on a debate that feels as old as time, humanities versus STEM.
I’ve been involved in a few conversations about how the sciences, not only can, at times, kind of like, disregard humanities as a valuable area of study, but also there’s a need for humanities in the sciences.
So can, I mean, I’m just curious, like, can you share your thoughts on that topic? Like, what do you think about that whole thing?
DS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there’s been, like, a few decades of conversation about the crisis in the humanities. Um, I don’t know if you’ve encountered that term, but it’s like something that’s related to the shrinking funds of the humanities, the idea that the humanities, um, scholarship doesn’t let you do things that are practical, it doesn’t get you jobs, right? That kind of rhetoric.
And at the same time, there has been a lot of investment in STEM education. Because I think the two have happened alongside each other, not always in competition, we tend to think about them as related issues. Um, there have been, like, different kinds of initiatives, I think, to try to understand, like, the longer histories of these projects. Disciplines have always been in competition and conversation and I think this is like one manifestation of that.
But also, there is the sense that, like, [10:00] scientists do certain things that don’t require, like, imagination, or that don’t require understanding the history of where things come from. Whereas, like, histories of science teach us that not all scientific ideas are good, and that some failures can teach us things.
We know that, like, imagining certain things, like the submarine, was important for showing that that kind of technology is possible, right? So, um, often the first step towards, like, doing science is imagining something. Um, a hypothesis, which is like an element of scientific method, is ultimately an imaginative leap, right? That you’re going to try to prove.
Just, I think there’s like a longer conversation, maybe, or maybe more resources and investment to be made in thinking about how humanistic knowledge can change the way and enhance the way we do science, um, rather than just trying to, like, adopt scientific methods to do humanistic work. That went in many different directions, I realize.
PJ: No, that made a lot of sense. And I feel like that kind of segues into my next question. Your book, Possible Knowledge, there was that launch a couple of weeks back. So can you talk about that project, why you think the contents are important, and why do you think, like, this book is important for people to have and read?
DS: The book studies what I would call imaginative techniques, such as hypothesis, conjecture, prediction, counterfactuals, that often originate or are tested in imaginative writing, that is literature. And we see many of these techniques implicitly or explicitly at play in scientific works of the 16th and 17th century, which is the period I study.
So basically the book is making an argument that what we often think of as a history of science is also rooted in the history of imagination, and we need to think about the two together. And I do so by studying these techniques in the writings of poets and dramatists like Shakespeare and Milton and Margaret Cavendish to show that literary writers were also constructing specific ways of knowing that we often don’t see because we think about those issues in different ways and we might when we see them inside, like in the discourse of science, we recognize them as knowledge, but when we see them in the discourse of the literature, you don’t think about it in those terms.
In some ways, it’s kind of to reclaim, um, some, in some ways, the imaginative foundations of a lot of knowledge, um, for the literary, rather than trying to rebrand, let’s say, that literature is scientific or something like that.
And I think this ties back to what I was saying earlier that there are specific ways in which humanists think and there are specific ways in which literature as a discipline prepares us to think and know and devaluing those modes is kind of doing a disservice to this kind of knowledge production. And studying them for what they are can help us probably, or maybe, hopefully, think about new ways of not only doing literature, but also doing science and like bringing those conversations together.
PJ: Professor Sarkar has been working on this book for years, so it’s very exciting that it’s finally here and ready for the masses.
I found the premise of Possible Knowledge fascinating, and I appreciate the innovative way she positions literature and the imagination at the center of the sciences, and creativity alongside academia.
Professor Sarkar was kind enough to share an excerpt from the introduction of her book. It reads: ““Right poets…borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range only reigned with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.” Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy.
“Living through the slow collapse of the Aristotelian cosmos, early modern thinkers felt long prevailing ideas of truth and reality shifting under their feet. The expressions of skepticism, doubt, and even bewilderment that pervade Renaissance writing conveyed the unease of a culture struggling to cope with this widespread sense of incertitude.
“The stakes, after all, were immense. Not only were novel theories like Copernicus’s heliocentrism aggravating feelings of uncertainty by remodeling the cosmos, they were also displacing both Earth and humans from the center of the universe.
“Even as early modern thinkers gradually developed techniques to reckon with a world that might remain essentially unknowable, they had to confront an even more fundamental and profoundly more disturbing prospect, that their own existential status in the cosmos was, in consequence, precarious.
“This dual crisis [15:00] of epistemological uncertainty and ontological precarity could not be resolved merely by studying what was manifest, perceivable, or even probable. Instead, as this book shows, writers and thinkers became fascinated by the capacious domain of the possible. Possible Knowledge studies the radical ingenuity of 16th and 17th century English writers who mobilized acts of literary worldmaking to forge new theories of physical and metaphysical reality during this period of intellectual ferment.
“By treating poesy, a general early modern term for literature, as the engine of a dynamic intellectual paradigm, this book explores how the imaginative allure of the possible reshaped central problems of Renaissance thought, including relations between words and things, between form and matter, even between self and world.”
The trajectory of Professor Sarkar’s scholarship is symbolic of the sort of thinking and questions we all need to be more aware of. STEM education is valuable and important, but it’s lacking when we don’t consider the ways that literature and the humanities can support, maybe even expedite, scientific findings, and the sorts of applications they can have in our everyday lives.
Professor Sarkar also shared with me that while Possible Knowledge was a result of her transition from the sciences to English literature, her newer project is more connected to her culture, background, and the overall remnants of colonialism in education systems. The project is concerned with racialization and race-making and how they are foundational to the key tenets of early modern poetics.
DS: So the project kind of grows out of my interest in thinking about literary form and nature, broadly speaking, together, um, so hence the literature and science of the first book, and the other ways in which people thought about nature in the early modern period is in terms of the environment and place. But this was also a period of like, um, at least in England, early colonization, right, like ‘discovery’ literature. I put discovery in quotes because, like obviously, that’s not discovery.
Um, and kind of like the beginning of the long histories of enslavement and colonization that we’re still grappling with now, right? So, when I started thinking more about the natural world, it was harder for me not to think about how certain categories of people, women, um, foreigners, racialized people, the colonized, were often dehumanized, were also naturalized, like, they were talked about as part of nature rather than humanity.
And so that was kind of the incentive for starting to think about the project. And because I am interested in thinking about literary form and poetry, um, I started looking for how these ideas manifest in, like, really poetry but also poetic manuals, rhetorical manuals that everyone in the period was reading and learning from to kind of think about how some of this discourse of race and place and nature was like embedded in the rhetoric and poetry of the period in such fundamental ways that they become part of the fabric of everyday language.
So that’s kind of the very broad idea of the project and, yeah, we’ll see where it goes. I’m really hoping it will turn into a book project and I’m excited to do a lot of reading for it in the next few months.
PJ: Can you talk about the ways that your heritage might have impacted or affects your research and your professional career?
DS: The work that I’m doing for this project on, like, that I’m, like, thinking of in terms of race, place, and poetics, right, I think, um, is trying to understand that, like, how the language that I’ve been learning my whole life and that I’ve learned as, like, a product of a colonial education in India, right, naturalizes certain forms of difference and essentializes, um, foreigners as others is also like something that like I’ve been working with throughout my graduate education and in my teaching, and it’s not something that’s always front and center.
Um, so, so that’s like the very quick answer to that question, but, um, at the level of the classroom, I would say I also try to bring in maybe what we would call more global materials to think about, um, the period. So when I’m teaching Renaissance literature, I might bring in images from the Mughal Empire, let’s say, right, and do some comparative work. Um, and while I’m not trained in that in the same way, it’s always exciting to expose students to this kind of material that, like, I have some intuitive knowledge of and some basic knowledge of because of my earlier training, but that they would not encounter in a lot of [20:00] other Renaissance literature classes.
PJ: So thinking beyond your scholarship and your professional career, if you could get more people to care about one thing, what would it be?
DS: That’s a tough question. What one thing? I feel like it’s kind of cliché to say poetry at this point, but [laughs] I think I’ll say that. Um, and I say that like, even though I work on it, um, but I think when we think of like fun reading…we often gravitate towards fiction, uh, as in, like, novels or short stories or prose works, um, rather than poetry. And poetry seems, like, more elite and some only, like, fewer people can, like, just read it, like, a poetry anthology with, like, the same kind of time and dedication.
Um, so maybe, it would be fun if like everyone read a poem a day. Uh, if I could make them do that, that would be nice. That’s, that’s what my, like actual, like one of my not-work ambitions is to keep reading more poetry. So, um, and especially more contemporary poetry.
PJ: During her free time, Professor Sarkar also likes to knit and hike.
DS: I mean, I think I like to hike partly because it, like, takes me to new places. It lets me explore places in ways that I don’t think I would in other ways. Um, and it’s like a way of engaging my, like, physical and mental selves together in ways that I don’t think we get a lot of time in our daily life.
Because I did not grow up in this country, uh, I grew up in India, like it’s been, it’s, it’s been like one of my primary ways of knowing different places in the U. S. like the landscape in the northeast is very different from the landscape in southern California and to hike in those different landscapes means you’re thinking about different things and noticing different animal and plant life and things like that, so I think there is like that element, too.
My favorite hiking memory, um, well, I think it would be wrong if I didn’t say this. It’s like the first time my now four-year-old went hiking and walked one full mile. And we were so proud, we were like, “Okay, he can do it!” So it was it was really fun and like I mean he obviously did not know what, like, a mile is but he was very excited to have accomplished…he made it to a certain point that we thought he could. And it was really fun to see.
PJ: So our last questions, few questions, is a rapid fire. Just one question. Like the first thing that comes to your mind, like quick as possible.
So, favorite book?
DS: Uh, Pride and Prejudice, very obvious.
PJ: Uh, your favorite city.
DS: Kolkata.
PJ: Favorite poet?
DS: Lady Mary Wroth.
PJ: Favorite food/favorite cuisine?
DS: So Bengali cuisine, um, like any type of fish curry.
Um, having returned from India last week, I, like, especially, like, have to say that.
PJ: Your favorite season?
DS: Fall.
PJ: What’s your favorite color?
DS: Oh my goodness. Red.
PJ: What’s your favorite thing about being a mom?
DS: It’s to kind of see, like, a new person coming into being. If that makes sense. Like this is a person that keeps changing and you don’t know how they will change and what they will become and that’s been like really, really fun to discover.
PJ: Absolutely. And do you have, like, a favorite memory with your son? Besides the hiking one.
DS: Besides the hiking. Um. Well, this is, like, so mundane and such an English professor thing to say, but I will say it.
So like, I have a new couch in my office. That was, like, my dream to have a couch in my office so that I can lie down and read. And the first week that we set it up, he would come and occupy it the whole time.
And so we had to ‘share’ like, share in quotations because, like, he would just occupy like three-fourths of it and I would be like, “Move, move, move,” and so it’s like, both fun to see him, like, claiming that space, but also, like, as someone who loves to read, like, it’s like, oh my god, look at him, like, trying to read in the space that I thought I would read in.
So that’s like a very recent, uh, fun memory. I think that’s, like, the one that comes to mind immediately.
[Ambwa Ki Chhaiyan Mein by Shubha Mudgal fades in]
PJ: Nice. And last question, what’s his name, out of curiosity?
DS: Takshak.
PJ: Oh! Does that, like, mean anything?
DS: Yeah, so, I mean, in, like, Hindu [25:00] mythology, there is, like, um, I think a snake king called Takshak, so I think that’s where most people know the name from, but it’s, like, means, like, a creator or an architect.
Um, like, so that’s what I think we were, like, that’s what drew us to the name.
PJ: I really enjoyed speaking with Professor Sarkar. As a student who’s neck deep in English, it was super cool and encouraging to learn about yet another use for the degree; to deconstruct what we understand as science and reconstruct it with literature and language at its center.
The way her scholarship focuses on the significance of the imagination reminded me of a quote from the most famous scientist himself, Albert Einstein. He once said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead.”
I think her work is a testament to how fruitless it can be to put the humanities and STEM against each other. Like Professor Sarkar said, we should be focusing on how we can combine these two fields. They’re essential to each other, and a deep understanding of both can lead to meaningful changes in our education systems, and in the long run, how we understand our world.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Professors are Cool People, Too. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed producing it, and I’ll catch you in the next one.
Listen to Episode 4
[Merchandise by Fugazi fades in]
PJ: Hello everyone, I’m Pascale, and welcome to Professors are Cool People Too. For our final interview of the season, I had the pleasure of speaking with Associate Professor Grégory Pierrot.
Professor Pierrot was born and raised in Metz, a city on the eastern side of France, and while enrolled in college there, he was an Americanist.
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For his undergraduate thesis and MA dissertations, he wrote about 20th century U.S. literature and music. It wasn’t until he went back to school at Penn State that he started specializing in African American literature and, more generally, in Black studies.
GP: So when, uh, when I went to college in France, I had to decide between studying English or studying history, those were my two favorite subjects. And my logic was that if I studied history, then I would most likely no longer study English. While, if I studied English, I could still study history. So then that’s how I decided to major in English.
You know, so I did my undergrad, uh, and started a PhD – I got a master’s and started a PhD in France – that I did not finish because I moved here. And, you know, there are, um, complications, uh, with my, uh, dissertation director. That’s the nice version.
But when, uh, when I was in the US, uh, for a few years, when I moved here, I was just, you know, doing temp jobs, basically. And it wasn’t that great. I was also an adjunct at a, um, at a community college teaching French, which reminded me that I had no interest in teaching French [laughs].
Uh, so when I was doing this, uh, it was my wife who said, you know, you’re still writing. I was writing a lot in fanzines and other things and she said, that’s what you want to do, so why don’t you try to go back to school? Uh, so when I applied for grad school at that point in time I actually asked myself what, you know, I have a chance to actually, you know, do exactly or potentially, you know, claim what I want to do. And at that point in time, I was especially interested in Black studies, right?
Uh, I was going to go in an English department, but also was fully aware that being bilingual and having the interests that I have, uh, would be something to, to speak about, right? I didn’t necessarily just want to, uh, study African American literature, even though that was my interest, but I was also interested in African American literature in conversation with, you know, the Caribbean, France, uh, you know, other communities, Black communities, of the world.
So that is what I wrote about in my application to Penn State. And when they let me in, then, you know, uh, I pretty much did what I wanted to do.
PJ: Also, I think you have an interesting perspective, having studied here and in France. Can you talk about the similarities and differences that you’ve noticed regarding the higher-ed here and abroad?
GP: Yeah, so, as I said, you know, uh, it was a while back, and I have to think that things have changed to some extent, and in ways that I have not seen. So with that caveat, uh, there are also elements that I believe have not changed just because of the way the systems are. And so there are many things, uh, that we do in French high schools that, from what I’ve seen, you don’t really get to do in the U.S. until college.
In my experience, where I went, there’s like a double, um, system in France when you go to college. There are regular colleges, and there are also those what they call higher schools, right? École Supérieure. Uh, that sort of prep you to this entirely different, very elitist system of, uh, they’re all public, but they’re very, uh, they’re more difficult to get into.
And so you prep for two years, technically your first two years of college, uh, to take the exam to get into those schools. So that’s what I did. And so what that meant is that, contrary to most people who would have to specialize the first year of college, for those two years, I kept getting classes in, you know, uh, geography, history, and so on and so forth.
Uh, but there were, those were really, uh, you know, they grade really hard and it’s sink or swim. But it’s really a good, very good, uh, good training in writing.
What I’ve grown to understand is that there are very many equivalents to this in the U.S., but it implies a lot of money. And that is a fundamental difference, I think, and definitely has no way that it’s changed. Between France and the U.S. is that in France, you can actually go all the way to your PhD spending, uh, a minimal portion of what Americans have to spend doing the same thing.
The amount of money that you have to pay in the U. S. to go to college is just unbelievable to me. Uh, you know, I say this all the time and [5:00] I think it’s true, uh, though I realize it’s, you know, people just look at things differently, but if I’d had to pay that much, I probably never would have gone to college in the U.S., certainly not, you know, with the way my parents grew up and the way, you know, the way people work with money.
I mean, to go into debt for education is just baffling to me. Uh, I understand why people do it, but just if that was the way they ran things in France, it would, I mean, you know, there would be, [laughs] there would be major problems, let’s say.
And so that’s also, that also changes the system in a way that, uh, so in France, you can, if you pass the end of high school exam, then you can go to college. Uh, you know, they may or may not have enough seats, but you will, you know, nobody’s going to stop you. There’s no, uh, selection at, at the entrance, or at least there wasn’t when I went.
Uh, but selection happens as you go through college, because they also don’t grade, uh, anywhere as nicely as they do in the U.S. Um, another thing I’ve noticed, I would say, is that overall in the U.S., what I can tell they value, uh, diplomas, especially depending where you went, right? So, I mean, if you go to prestigious schools, then it apparently is worth more than if you went to other places.
Uh, I wouldn’t say that’s quite true in France. I mean, there are certainly universities, excuse me, they’re more reputed than others for some specialties and whatnot. But overall, you won’t get a diploma unless you deserve it. Right? And that is very much related to the way people grade. You don’t get A’s in college in France, unless you’re in exact sciences, I guess.
In the humanities, it’s near unheard of. And part of the reason is, you know, there’s an old saying that some professors used when I was still going there, they would say, we grade out of 20 points in France, so they would say “20 is for God and 19 is for your teacher,” right? So, but technically nobody gets above 18, which I guess is what, like, A-.
And it’s not, you know, getting a C is fine, right? C is a passing grade and it’s not great, but it doesn’t, you know, uh, diminish your accomplishment because that’s the point, right? Like anything above this, uh, shows that you’re doing a good job. But C is, is like, yeah, that’s, you know, you’ve done what you were expected to do.
It’s not great, but that’s fine. Well, in the U.S., like, people just, you know, I see a lot of people just can’t believe it if they get a C or C- even though, as far as I’m concerned, that may be what you deserve, right? So then, I still struggle with this, right? Because on paper, in the U.S., it should work the same way, but that’s not at all how it works in real life.
So those, I would say, and the way you value grades, the way you grade, um, and, and money, I would say the two, two major differences, um, but I think they’re related to, to also, you know, bigger, uh, systems of value and the way people consider education at large.
PJ: Professor Pierrot teaches at our Stamford campus and likes it because of the diverse student body and the intimate size.
Some of Professor Pierrot’s favorite courses to teach are Music in African American literature and Memory and History in Graphic Novels because they highlight how literature is connected to other artforms while being inspired by, and part of, popular culture.
A line from his course description for the former course reads, “In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass notes the profound significance of the sorrow songs sung by the enslaved. “I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.”
Close to a hundred years later, Leroi Jones provocatively quipped that, “Only in music, and most notably in blues, jazz, and spirituals, i. e. Negro music, has there been a significantly profound contribution by American Negroes.”
Both authors underline the crucial role played by music in African American culture in particular, but also American culture in general. This course proposes to explore the ways in which musical traditions have informed African American literature.”
GP: The course about music to me is just, I mean, maybe it’s obvious, I like music [laughs]. It’s nice to talk about it. Uh, it’s not an easy course to teach, I would say. And I, you know, I’ve noticed, having taught it several times, uh, as much as people like music, people are, I don’t want to say scared, but they really struggle with writing about it. Which to me is part of what should make it interesting, but can be kind of hard on people, on students, I’ve noticed.
But to me, that’s why it also is interesting, right? Like, people tend to take this class because they like music and they realize, well, you know, maybe that’s what we’re going to do. And yeah, that’s what we’re going to do. Even though the course is really about music in literature, which sometimes they maybe did not read closely enough and they realize, which is fine too, right?
Yeah, I love that course because to me, it’s sort of in a microcosm, [10:00] everything I like about scholarship. It makes connections between things that may not be obviously connected and it makes connections between things that may not be obviously connected, also, um, hierarchically, I want to say, right?
I mean, people tend to think, you know, our literature is like high literature and low literature. There’s high music and low music. Um, but, you know, uh, pop music is everywhere, and popular writing is everywhere, and genre writing is everywhere, and they connect in very interesting ways. You can watch, you know, some trashy movie you’ve seen, and it turns out that, like, you know, they quote Blake or whatever.
Uh, you know what I mean? It’s like, you know, I always tell people, and I remember this vividly, the very first time I read a poem by William Blake was in an issue of Spider-Man.
PJ: In the course description for Memory and History in Graphic Novels, Pierrot writes, “From its roots in ancestral art, hieroglyphics and tapestries, to modern day graphic novels, storytelling in images has long been focused on the recording of events, private and collective.
This course will look at a variety of comics and graphic novels exploring stories at the confluence of memory and history, looking at first person individual trajectories in the turmoil of world events, and how the medium Scott McCloud defines as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” makes for unique and specific approaches to the portrayal and understanding of history.”
GP: Uh, I am genuinely convinced that it really doesn’t matter what you read because those connections are always there if you bother to look for them. So curiosity to me trumps everything else. And what I hope, and you know, I’m sure it works sometimes and sometimes not, but what I hope courses like these might achieve is show how those connections work with specific examples and maybe examples that will speak directly to, to, to some of the students, right?
I mean, uh, you know, I try to stay up on contemporary music. So it’s not just, you know. Because the thing about pop music is even when, you know, 20 years ago, it was yesterday for me, but it was before your birth.
So I mean, what does it, you know, it’s not always relevant, um, but it becomes relevant when, you know, you realize that that sample is in the song that came out yesterday, right? Uh, and so, you know, I really like those genealogies also, because for one, it shows that nothing comes from out of nowhere.
Uh, but also hopefully again, it might titillate people’s curiosity to like go out and see, all right, so, you know, that, I don’t know, Nicki Minaj sample was used like four times already. Who used it along the way? What’s the conversation between them, right, for example.
And then again, music to literature those are all big conversations and I think it’s nice to find ways into them.
PJ: Absolutely, and taking that idea a little bit further, um, what generally speaking, what do you hope students walk away with after completing a course with you?
GP: You know, I would, I would hope that they would value their own curiosity. I mean, not that they don’t, right? I certainly, you know, I don’t, they don’t need me to say this, but, uh, what I hope is that they might realize that this is how you become a scholar if that’s what you’re interested in. Uh, and if that’s not what you’re interested in, you don’t have to make a job out of it, right?
I mean, the principle that leads my scholarship is the same principle that led my readings when I was a teenager. There’s really no fundamental difference. I would say the difference is I’m older and I have different means and now it’s my job, but like, essentially, it’s not that different, and that curiosity can really feed into anything.
I think it’s a good thing to do, period. Whether or not that’s your job, but then it also does train you into doing all sorts of things. You know, I often joke with students that if they do what they’re expected to do with the assignments, uh, it’s essentially, you know, investigation work. I only say this halfway jokingly, right?
We’re not like, you know, sleuthing on, on people to find out what they do in their, in their private lives. Uh, but sometimes we’ll be sleuthing on people who are dead, right? So then maybe they won’t mind. But, uh, all their texts are, sleuthing on, on, on writing, uh, and culture, right?
You know, a few, a few years back already, when the TV show Watchmen on HBO came out, um, you know, it referred to, um, the, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. And that’s an interesting thing, because by now, people are aware of it, I would say, in ways that they were not when that TV show came out, and certainly were even less before that TV show came out. It’s become a cultural reference in really odd ways, because, and I say odd because until those TV shows, it was one of those events that historians would say, nobody knows this happened, right?
It’s been buried and, you know, finding out about it is just like one of those, uh, really horrendous moments. And you think, how could I not know about this? You know, I work on the Haitian revolution and at some level, it’s the same thing, right? Once you know about it, you’ll see it everywhere. But then it also makes you wonder how you never saw it until you saw it [15:00].
And that’s also what I mean by investigation and sleuthing, right? Like, I’m very history-minded, so it tends to be historical, but culturally speaking, it works the same way. You know, curiosity leads you to those things, right? And it does lead you to make connections. And I think I personally tend to think that it’s a good thing in and of itself, but what I like to imagine is that in the process of doing those things about literature, about culture in classes, students might realize that it is also relevant directly to their lives, right?
Culture is politics. It’s economics. They don’t stop at music and literature, those connections, right? They, they are, they connect, you know, books and albums to everything else and nothing’s stopping you from seeing like the, you know, that is a direct line from music fashion to clothing fashion to commerce, right?
I was just talking about that earlier today. Uh, everything can be that serious, but you know, it depends on you, right? As a, as a reader, writer, and researcher.
PJ: Outside of the classroom, Professor Pierrot has written for a project initiated and edited by a fellow UConn English Professor, Dr. Bhakti Shringarpure. I’m sorry if I said that wrong.
The project’s called ‘Decolonize That: Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas’. The idea arose when the term ‘decolonize’ was starting to gain some mainstream attention, but like most buzzwords, was getting abused and misused. Professor Shringarpure’s goal became showcasing concretely what this term could look like in practice.
GP: So the idea was a series of short books, sort of like little manuals, right? I mean, easy to read, accessible, right? Uh, written by scholars, maybe, for the most part, but not for scholars. Away from, you know, writing that can be fairly jargony and, you know, demonstrative, uh, for scholarship, but something more mainstream, uh, addressing different, you know, issues, different topics where, where the idea of decolonization might be relevant.
And I said, okay, that sounds great. And so she was like, “So what would you write?” And, uh, you know, I was like, I, I don’t know. I don’t really, like, I didn’t feel like…I work on literature and like, you know, it seemed like not necessarily best topic or I didn’t feel necessarily like the best person for it.
And I sort of said, almost as a joke, I said, “Well, I’d write about hipsters,” right? And she said, “Oh, great idea. Okay, so you can do that.” And so, you know, like I said, yes, now it’s too late to back out. It wasn’t, but I thought, okay, so I’ll try that out.
PJ: Alongside Decolonize Hipsters, there’s Decolonize Museums, Self Care, and Multiculturalism.
GP: So the, the, the series is ongoing. The books are excellent. Uh, highly recommend it. And yeah, so that’s, that’s the, that’s the overall idea. Um, again, I still, Bhakti and I are still friends, so I keep up on, I know what’s coming, but like she, that’s really, that’s really her project. I’m just one of the authors.
PJ: No, but it’s still really cool. I actually have Decolonize Hipsters and I started reading it, I’m about, like, a halfway through. I appreciate it’s, it’s conversational, like the way you said it’s approachable. So I think in that sense, it’s, like, nail on the head and it’s an interesting concept. I really enjoy, I’m enjoying it.
I wasn’t just saying that because I was interviewing him. I actually do have a copy, shout out to Melanie Hepburn, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. It’s assertive and thoughtful, and I think it’s only fair to share a quote:
“I remember to this day a friend of mine trying to convince my father to sell him an old Adidas tracksuit top.
“My father was horrified. He’d owned that old brown thing long enough for it to become his official gardening outfit and couldn’t fathom why anyone would want it, much less pay for it. I couldn’t explain it either, unmoved as I was by the seductive power of ochre.
My friend was dead serious, though, and his request spoke of a rising trend that would soon see luxury thrift stores sprout up all over the place – what had once been the province of the poor and the strapped-for-cash bohemian was increasingly turning into a cool thing, the clothing equivalent of the DJ’s never-ending hunt for an unknown vinyl.”
Within this same text, it’s apparent that Professor Pierrot keeps up with pop culture. This led me to ask him if he’s noticing anything within my and the younger, more tech-centric generations that makes him hopeful for the future.
GP: I think younger generations that actually use those tools, which I don’t, or not quite the same way, to find ways around the problems. Uh, and I’m not aware of it because I’m not really that, again, TikTok is, you know, something I know of and I see it often, but always mediated by something, right? I see it on YouTube or I see it by way of Instagram or, you know, it’s never TikTok itself, which I don’t have.
I do know that it is a tool like everything else for mobilization, for political mobilization, for awareness, um, and this is, you know, to me, that’s the positive side. I’m not aware of this because I’m old, uh, but I have no doubt that young people or younger people will find ways to use this for a lot of good things as well, quite simply. I’ve seen it, for one thing, [20:00] and second, it’s always true.
One thing that makes me hopeful is that, you know, not to speak in very general terms, but again, I’ve seen it at the microlevel, uh, and, and very much at the macro-level, because you hear a lot of people complain about this, uh, I think younger generations are a lot more aware of a lot of things.
They’re a lot kinder, I mean, generally speaking, right? I mean, there’s awareness of a lot of things that were discarded outright and made fun of by, by, by older people. You know, when you always hear, oh, you know, snowflake generation, blah, blah, blah. I think it’s funny, you know, because I really think younger people are a lot stronger than we were.
And partly because they talk about all sorts of things that we couldn’t speak about. That’s the exact opposite of weakness, as it turns out. To be able to do this, uh, you know, speak about issues of any kind, racism, you know, microaggressions, mental issues, I mean everything, right? And to put it out there and to actually work on it.
Uh, to be able to put your foot down and say, no, I need my time, you know, all things that were unfathomable, um, for people, our generation and remain so often, I think that’s, that’s a very, very interesting show of strength and it’s a very generational thing. So, at that level, I’m very hopeful because I think, um, these attitudes and this way of, you know, and that’s related to technology also, to some extent, I think, certainly, uh, suggests a different way of doing things, whether or not that pans out, but we’ll see.
I think it has in many ways already. I think, you know, we wouldn’t have had, uh, the Black Lives Matter movement the way, the way it happened without those technology, without those behaviors, you know, uh, it didn’t, didn’t stop the other wave to come in, but, like, I think, uh, yeah, again, that, that definitely makes me hopeful.
PJ: Currently, Professor Pierrot is working on several projects. To name a few: an article on the plays of Archie Shepp, an artist mostly known as a prominent saxophonist of the free jazz scene. He’s also trying to write a book in French on the prose fiction of the Black Power era, and he recently joined a group project about La Revue des Colonies.
GP: This project is run by another friend and colleague, uh, Maria Beliaeva Solomon, who teaches at the University of Maryland. Um, and so a magazine that was published in Paris, uh, between the mid 1830s and the early 1840s, it lasted for about eight years, I believe. Um, and the editor was this free man of color from Martinique named Cyril Bisset.
Uh, so he was born free, but at a time when slavery was still practiced in the French colonies. And so he comes from Martinique in the West Indies. I’ll spare you the whole biography, but he had to, he was sent in exile, uh, because of his politics and sent to France, but what he did in France was start this magazine that was sort of meant as a vehicle for abolitionism and also a counterpoint for what was then common, right, like pro-slavery, pro-colonization magazines.
Um, not that he was exactly against colonization, but again, that’s a nuance for later. But, uh, you know, he, so he started this abolitionist magazine that gave a space for people of color, uh, not just from the French Caribbean, but also, you know, the broader Caribbean from the U.S. to publish fiction, also political articles, historical articles about the Black world at large.
And so, uh, this magazine is known. Um, like, for example, in the U.S., one of the ways you’ll see it is because, uh, what is currently considered the earliest published African American short story was actually published in French in that magazine. It was written by an African American author from Louisiana who was also writing in French.
Um, and so the project to get back to this, uh, we’re trying to see how many of the original issues we can get, uh, and to offer a scholarly edition of the whole review. So we’d go through every issue, sort of clarify what the references are, you know, footnotes and everything. Um, and ideally also put this online, right?
So the end point would be an online, uh, digital scholarly edition of the review. But on the way there, we’re also, you know, there’s several of us working that have slightly different specialties. Um, so we’ll probably also write about, you know, different aspects of the, of the, of the magazine. So we’re in the early stages of doing this, um, but yeah, I have good hopes. I think it’s going to be, it’s going to be very interesting.
PJ: While I was preparing for this interview, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of Professor Pirro’s scholarship is about Haiti. As a Haitian myself, I had to be a little selfish and pick his brain about what draws him to the tiny island I get to call home.
So, Haiti. Um, we sort of got into this in your pre-interview form, but um, a lot of your scholarship is about Haiti, the Haitian revolution, and you’re a member of the Haitian Studies [25:00] Association. So, why Haiti? Like, what, what draws you to Haitian history?
GP: My family on my mother’s side is from Martinique in the Caribbean. This is how I first heard about Haiti, it was through her, through my mother. And it’s funny because, you know, if you, uh, she’s typically always pretending that, you know, she’s not interested in history. She’s not interested. She doesn’t read books. None of it is true, right, just for the record. Uh, but that’s the way she speaks of things.
So, uh, my dad was always a history buff. He had all these history books and, um, so it would seem like, you know, most of the history came from, from his side. And it’s true to a point, but, but this came from her and, and in very, very subtle ways, right? When I was very little, I was a total nerd and very much, you know, I was into history way too early, but, uh, I was very much into Napoleon. Um, which, you know, again, it’s a very, very typically French disease.
But the alternative to Napoleon came through her, right? Uh, it was like, well, you know, you might, you might look into what this man did, uh, in the Caribbean. Which eventually I did and, and once I did and got interested in it you can’t, obviously you can’t avoid Haiti. Because, while he reestablished slavery in Guadeloupe, for example, very violently, uh, it was never abolished in Martinique because Martinique was taken over by England.
Um, you know, the French Republic abolished slavery for a while, uh, which is sometimes bragged about, but rarely, or at least traditionally, rarely explained how. Which was that they were forced to, uh, by people in what is now Haiti, that was then, uh, then Saint Domingue, who basically told them, you can abolish slavery and keep this island or you can, you know, you can lose it, so that’s your choice.
And so it looks, it looks all great, but then once you start looking into things again, what you find out is this amazing event that somehow, uh, the greatest countries in the world that were somehow involved in it managed to basically silence for centuries, right? I mean, you can live an entire life in France and never find out that Napoleon, I’m trying to stay polite here [laughs], but that Napoleon’s first major defeat was handed to him by formerly enslaved people in the Caribbean.
You’d think you would know, right? But no. Somehow that never pops up, right? And so this uprising that lasted, like the war lasted over 10 years, involved Great Britain, Spain, France, certainly, the United States, at least commercially. It was one of the most major events of its time. As I say often, you cannot find a newspaper, I want to say between 1791 and 1804, that does not mention Haiti. Period. Anywhere in the U.S., France, or England.
And yet, right, uh, you can live your entire life and never hear about this in any of these countries. Um, so that’s why I got interested in it, because the more I look into it, the more it’s evident to me that, you know, uh, again, to the selfish element, I guess, is that to me, it’s, it’s part of my personal history, uh, by way of, you know, my, my Caribbean roots.
But the broader version of this, to me quite simply, that it belongs to the history of the world. And I think, I think people should know, should know more about it because that’s a part of the history of the world that we can still learn from and that we should be learning from in 2023.
PJ: I respect Professor Pierrot’s professionalism, but I don’t feel the need to mirror it. In case it wasn’t clear, Napoleon’s first ass-whooping was the Haitian Revolution.
In all seriousness, Haitians unique reputation of unmatched levels of patriotism and nationalism is for this very reason. And I think it’s absolutely shameful that we’ve been ousted from global politics and economics for centuries because we refused to accept bondage, and how we’re infantilized and crippled by the same countries who deny our rightful place alongside them.
A more personal question, do you think the way that, I mean, this is complicated. I know it is. But do you think that the way Haiti is portrayed in media today has anything to do with their reputation as being that first liberated Black colony?
GP: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, that’s the short answer. Yes.
PJ: Right.
GP: You know, there’s…it’s not a matter of blaming, you know, it’s easy to say, well, you know, it’s 2023, it was literally over 200 years ago, and people love doing that, right? Oh, well, it’s so long ago, uh, slavery was so long ago, blah, blah, blah. Uh, you know, as I forget who was saying something along those lines recently, it’s funny what’s so long ago and what isn’t.
Right? Uh, you know, you can still hear, you know, somehow that the American Constitution is not long enough ago that you can still have, you know, people pretend you have to read it exactly the way it was intended, right? It makes no sense whatsoever, but [30:00] they can’t get over that. Uh, but, you know, people have to get over slavery.
Anyway, but beyond this, uh, yeah, no, I think it’s undeniable. People have written about this much better than I have, but of course. You know, this is a country that was basically ostracized for its success. I mean, a success on the field is never, on the field of battle, is never a full success in that, you know, whatever you achieve, you achieve by killing people, right? There was no way around it, just to be clear, but you know what I mean? Right? It’s like, all right, so, you won the war.
You’ll hear people say, well, the South, you know, lost the Civil War in the U.S., but it won the peace, which is really a, you know, very, very deep and very short and accurate way of describing what happened to the U.S. after the end of the Civil War, right? I mean, the South lost, but their ideas lived on and actually, you know, took over, right?
Uh, as far as Haiti is concerned, I would say, I would say something fairly similar, right? Haiti won the war, uh, but they lost the peace. Once they became independent, they fell in, you know, they fell prey to Great Britain, right?
Uh, their only half ally, uh, in the area. Uh, the U.S. refused to do commerce with them for a while, or, you know, under very peculiar conditions. And then eventually France, uh, recognized them, uh, you know, for, for a tribute that ruined the country.
You know, there was this major series of articles in the New York Times published earlier last year, um, you know, showing stuff that historians have known for a while, but, like, it had the merit of giving it to, to, uh, or presenting it to, to the broader public, uh, showing exactly what we’re talking about, and the amount of money is insane, right? It would be insane for countries, for big countries like the U.S. or France, and we’re talking about a small island surrounded by enemies, you know, in the middle of the 19th century.
Beyond this, culturally speaking, again, this, they’re ostracized, you know, uh, economically, but also culturally and politically. They gain independence only to be ignored and also, you know, assaulted by countries for a while.
I mean, usually we hear about the American Invasion in 1915, and God knows that was major and, and terrible, and certainly, uh, influenced the way countries have dealt with Haiti in the 20th and 21st century, but before that, you know, Spain would routinely send, you know, uh, gunboats over there.
Spain, Germany, Europe. I mean, it’s a long history of, of people abusing a country for the sake of it being a Black independent nation. And Haiti’s paid for this for over 200 years. And I think no matter what people might claim in Canada, in France, in the U.S., they’re still paying for it.
Current situation is terrible, and yeah, it’s partly what happens within Haiti, undeniably. But what happens within Haiti is never unrelated to the rest of the world. People make money in Haiti. Um, you know, they say it’s costly to be poor. It’s very costly, uh, to Haiti. You know, Haiti tends to be presented, oh, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere or whatever. It’s funny, right?
Like for that country to be a place where everybody goes to get their t-shirts made, or to where you will find all, you know, so many American companies somehow making business. How does that work out? You know, how does this happen? Like none of this is random, and you can, you can only have those two things at the same time if people work on it, and people do work on it, and their work, they’ve been hostile to Haiti.
And, again, it didn’t start yesterday, right? There is a, like, here again, that’s one of the reasons history is important. So that people don’t go around saying, well, Haitians did that to themselves. No, of course they didn’t. The question is, like, how, how does this keep happening? Precisely because Haiti is not the only country involved in this, and Haitians aren’t the only people involved in this.
So, yeah, to go back to your question, I think you cannot separate what’s happening in Haiti right now from the history of Haiti and the international, like, history of international, uh, behavior towards Haiti.
PJ: A few days before this interview, I read an article in the news about the recent influx of gang violence in Haiti titled, “Soon There Will Be No One Left to Kidnap.”
My knee-jerk reaction was frustration at the part Haitians play in this, but I remember being simply incapable of blaming my people for what’s taking place. Professor Pierrot’s historical insights reminded me of what I already knew; that what’s happening now has been years in the making, and that those at fault are the ones pointing fingers.
Last question about Haiti, I promise. What, maybe, I don’t know if you want to call it an idealistic, romanticized, whatever, but what do you see based on what’s happening now and based on the history, like, what does, in your opinion, I guess, Haiti’s future maybe kind of look like? Speculative, totally.
GP: Yeah, my specialty is more 19th and 18th century, so I also don’t want to make it sound like I’m a specialist [35:00] of what’s currently going on because that’s definitely not true. You know, I mean, the conversation still is whether or not troops are going to go there again, uh, who might lead them, uh, what they’re going to do.
You know, notoriously, uh, one of the things that happened last time the U.N. went in is that they brought cholera with them, um, and that, you know, not to make metaphors of catastrophes, but I mean, to me, that is, that is very much in the image of the kind of help Haiti has received from the international community.
And so, one thing I have an issue with is this idea that somehow Haitians can’t fix this on their own and they need somebody else to come in and swoop in and show them how it’s done. I don’t think that’s true.
I do think that there’s a, uh, you say a hostile elite in charge there. I’m saying that in very general terms, but again, there are people making money off of catastrophe there as well. It’s not like you get rid of those people, you know, but, uh, it’s certainly a question.
There are people in Haiti that do want to live well and in peace. It’s not like, you know, everybody goes around saying, “I’m going to ruin the country today.” But the question is, how are they constantly prevented from doing this? Again, there are active forces there, right? Uh, everybody’s talking about gangs. Where are those weapons coming from? They don’t come from nowhere. Uh, they’re American weapons. They flow into this country. Uh, you know, somebody brings them, right?
I mean, again, people are making money off of this. So the idealistic version of this, uh, would start by countries like France and Canada and the U.S. leaving Haiti alone, actually, instead of stepping foot in there or pretending to swoop in like saviors, which they obviously have been unable to do.
And that’s the other thing, right? Everybody will talk about, like, oh, failed state, this and that. Like, how many times are we going to see, you know, international coalitions walk in there and do absolutely nothing? You know, it’s just like, how good can you be? Like, what exactly do you do every time you go in there?
You know, I went, I only visited Haiti once, but one of the things, um, I did see when I was there, um, you know, the Red Cross among other NGOs that have been in there that went in there after the big earthquake in 2010, um, got millions of dollars to build houses that never were built. Uh, this isn’t like, you know, it’s not like Haitians are in there, like, putting the money in their pockets, you know, their money went to the Red Cross.
Where did that money go afterwards? Who knows? Uh, I don’t. I’m sure people have looked into it that know better than I do, but one place I can tell you it didn’t go is Haiti. So how does that work, right? Uh, that’s a good place to start, maybe. Uh, maybe how about a little honesty? Maybe, you know, allowing people to be idealistic by actually doing what you claim to be doing in the first place.
Um, you know, before we tell Haitians what to do with themselves, how about we actually do what we pretend to do for them? That might be a good place to start. Uh, and I could start, you know, we could backtrack a few hundred years and start there.
And the rest of it, you know, I am personally actually convinced because I do believe in democracy and actually do believe that a majority of the people want what’s best for them: you have to let those people do it, of course.
Uh, and you know, if there’s anything happening underground in Haiti, as in many other places, by the way, it’s precisely preventing people from doing what’s best for them, because that’s not where you can get the most money. You know, ideally, that’s where I think it should start.
Because I’m not naïve I know it’s not going to happen that way. But honestly, you know, I don’t have a plan. I don’t know how, uh, you know, how to make that work. Um, but I do know that the way it’s talked about is, uh, constantly, you know, scattering red herrings, so we don’t have to talk about the more, the more serious things, including the ways, uh, again, all the countries that routinely intervene in Haiti are actually directly involved in, in, in the problems in Haiti.
PJ: With hindsight, these were definitely complex questions to ask, and I did ask them on the fly, but I felt I could ask them because I knew Professor Pierrot was equipped with the knowledge to answer them. In short, I trusted him to tell me the truth, which is becoming increasingly and devastatingly hard to come by.
Absolutely, I deeply respect and appreciate your insight on this. Um, thinking beyond your research and your academia. If you get more people to care about 1 thing, what would it be?
GP: Um, well, I mean, I guess it connects to, to, to the earlier answer. Um, I think, you know, when I was talking about curiosity and connections, I think, I think we gain out of understanding the complexity of things. Uh, I think, um, I was just reading a phrase, I’m going to paraphrase [40:00]. I don’t know who the author was, but somebody was saying that basically tyranny is the simplification of everything, right? Uh, pretending that things are simple.
If you make things simple, it’s always easier to convince people, right? But in the process, you’re most likely lying [laughs]. And so, um, I guess, you know, in a somewhat abstract way, I guess, um, you know, maybe that’s something I’d like to convey, right? Or at least contribute to convey is that if things seem complicated it’s because they are, but it doesn’t mean that…that’s not a problem, it is the way things are, and the better we know things, I think, the better we can help each other.
So the connections I mentioned earlier to me participate in this way. We will never stop finding how things connect and things get more complex, but again complex is not complicated, right? Things are complex, nuance is important, and the more we are aware of it, I think the better, the better things are.
PJ: So our last question is our rapid fire. You know, one question, one answer. So, first one, your favorite genre of music?
GP: Uh, it’s still Punk rock.
PJ: Punk rock?
GP: Yep.
PJ: Uh, your favorite city?
GP: New York City.
PJ: Mm-hmm. What’s your favorite punk rock artist, or who’s your favorite punk artist?
GP: Fugazi.
PJ: Fugazi? Right, okay. And what’s your favorite song by Fugazi?
GP: I would say Merchandise.
PJ: Um, who’s your favorite soccer player? You said soccer is your favorite sport.
GP: These are terrible questions! Uh, Zinedine Zidane.
PJ: Um, what’s your favorite season?
GP: Uh, fall.
PJ: Favorite movie?
GP: Uh, uh, uh, uh, um, alright. I’m still going to say 2001: Space Odyssey. It’s still not true, but that’s the first that comes to mind. So I’ll still say that.
PJ: Okay, what’s your favorite color?
GP: Black.
PJ: Nice, and what’s your favorite memory of coming to the United States for the first time?
GP: Hm. One that never fails to make me smile is, um, so when I, when I first came here, I was an exchange student at the University of Illinois, uh, and this was the summer of 2000, uh, and the big conversation there was whether or not they were going to get rid the mascot. This super racist mascot called Chief Illiniwek, a white dude that would dress up as an Indian chief and come dancing during football-it was unbelievably offensive and I’d never seen anything like it.
One of the first things they did was take us to a football game. That was an experience in and of itself. But when this happened, I honestly thought, I had no idea what I was seeing, right? And, um, so there was a big movement against Chief Illiniwek, and that summer there was a, um, big, big event, uh, against the Chief Illiniwek.
So all these organizations came to town, the A.I.M., American-Indian Movement, all sorts of organizations, student organizations, uh, came on the quad, so the main, uh, the main lawn at the university and they had tables out and they had conversations and concerts and speeches and it was such a lively way of doing politics.
Uh, and there’s, you know, a lot of politics in, in France and French universities but this was really different and it was really, uh, we were talking about, you know, hope earlier. This was really, uh, elating, right, to see because there was genuine joy. It was very serious, uh, very well informed.
Uh, and yeah, it was just great to see and yeah, I mean, I remember this, like, it was yesterday, but it was, it was fun. Uh, and also very again, very, very, very political and that was, yeah, that was a great moment. And that was my first year in the U.S..
[Merchandise by Fugazi fades in]
PJ: Awesome. That was my last question.
GP: Okay.
PJ: Thank you so much, again, for your flexibility.
GP: Oh, no problem. It’s better than grading, so. [I laugh] I shouldn’t say this, I’m still recording.
PJ: I really, really, really, really loved speaking with Professor Pierrot. My dad works for the Board of Ed in Stamford, so when I decided to go to UConn, I remember him telling me to somehow, someway, talk to Professor Pierrot, so gotta appreciate the full circle moment here.
Part of what drives his scholarship and teaching style is what drew me to English in the first place; it’s ability to provide a cultural history for almost anything, while giving you the space to study different writing styles, techniques, and intentions.
English makes space for curiosity in ways that other fields are, in my opinion, just not interested in, and doesn’t demand that you approach your interests already equipped with immense amounts of knowledge.
All you really need to find whatever it is that you’re looking for is curiosity and dedication, and I think that makes English accessible in ways other disciplines simply aren’t.
I also want to emphasize another point Professor Pierrot made. Complex is not complicated! I think the biggest disservice we can do to ourselves is think that we’re incapable [45:00] of fixing what’s broken. Our brains are big and beautiful and competent, and it’s time we trusted and allowed them to generate and realize solutions. Real solutions. Everything always seems impossible until it’s done, right? I mean, look at the Haitian Revolution.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Professors Are Cool People, Too. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed producing it, and I’ll catch you in the next one.
[Merchandise by Fugazi ends]
Listen to Episode 5
[Chopin Waltz No. 1 in E Flat, Op. 18 plays softly throughout]
PJ: Hello everyone, I’m Pascale, and this is my last episode of Professors are Cool People, Too. I absolutely loved talking with Professors Dennigan, Sarkar, and Pierrot, because despite being unique in their backgrounds and research specialties, they each encompass what I respect most about English as a field of study; it demands that you become a more thoughtful, informed person.
I mean, how could you not when you’re confronted with the same gender bias that artists from the 16th century fought against, the product of a racialized education system, or interested in histories that have been intentionally buried.
At the start of the season, I set out to uncover the cool person behind the profession, but found that what makes Professors Dennigan, Sarkar, and Pierrot cool is their profession. Being able to pursue what you find interesting and impart that knowledge onto young minds while encouraging them to do the same is a big deal. And they, along with teachers and professors everywhere, deserve much more respect and recognition for the amazing work that they do. Hopefully this podcast is a step in the right direction.
On a more personal note, I’ve always gotten along well with adults, sometimes better than with [00:01:00] kids my own age, and hosting this past season added to my reasons why. The conversations I got to initiate and participate in just tickle my brain in the best possible way.
I also have to say thank you, thank you, thank you to Professors Sarkar and Pierrot for their understanding, flexibility, and willingness to speak with me twice due to technical difficulties. Definitely not a preferable situation, but I found that our conversations went better the second time around.
I am very grateful that my interview with Professor Dennigan went smoothly. Quite literally don’t think I could have handled if my first interview went left; I likely would’ve taken that as a bad omen.
Once again, I have to thank Professor Sean Forbes for helping me turn each interview into a narrative; I would’ve been lost without you. Thanks to Ali O. for sharing a wealth of resources with me, specifically telling me what RSS and SEO means.
Biggest, warmest thanks go to Melanie Hepburn for being each episode’s first listener and for the consistent, positive comments. And an even bigger, warmer thank you to the English Department at UConn for their unwavering support, trust, and care during these [00:02:00] past four years.
One last thing, I thought it would be pretty fun to share some of this season’s bloopers. Producing this podcast was a lot of things, but easy is definitely not one of them. I hope these put a smile on your face, it was really fun putting this one together.
Showcasing the people that make English at UConn what it is has been an honor. I’ll carry this place and this time with me forever.
[Beep]
PJ: Well, ‘cause also you mentioned in your pre-interview form that you enjoy writing them because you find them, like, miraculous. So, just kind of-
DD: God, what was I talking about?
PJ: You had – [laughs].
[Beep]
PJ: Currently, Professor Dennigan is working on a libretto for a sung through musical…play? That’s-hold on.
[Beep]
PJ: “I came to Artemisia because I am, for lack of a better word, angry. Frustratingly, madden…” Wow. You see, I-I-I got a speech impediment, y’all. Give me a sec.
[Beep]
PJ: Artemisia Gentileschi’s [00:03:00] work offers this fantasy of female revenge through paintings like Judith beheading… Holfernes? I left her…Okay, enough.
[Beep]
PJ: Where were you guys hiking, like, when you took your son?
DS: So this was, this was in Southern California, like, um, in San Bernardo, San Bernando? Oh my god.
[Beep]
PJ: And the sorts of applications they can have in our everyday lives. Professor Sarkar also shar-Woah, woah, woah. You see, you got a little too confident.
[Beep]
PJ: The stakes, after all, were immense. Not only were novel theories like Cornucopious’s Helos-hold on.
[Beep]
PJ: This dual crisis of epistemo-There’s no way. Hold on.
[Beep]
PJ: Why is reading so hard? Okay.
[Beep]
GP: They grade really hard, and you – it’s sink or swim..swim or sink. Swim or sink? Whatever. Whichever, whichever way you want to look at it.
PJ: Currently, Professor Pierrot is [00:04:00] working on several projects. To name a few: an article on the plays of Archie Shep, an artist mostly known as a prominent saxophon-rrrr! Oh, f-
[Beep]
PJ: I respect Professor Pierrot’s professionalism, but I don’t feel the need to mirror it. In case it wasn’t clear, [laughing] Napoleon’s first ass whoopin’ was the Haitian Revolution!