On Figure/Ground Communication™

How did you decide to become a university professor? Was it a conscious choice to become a scholar?

Both of my parents and many other members of my family are professors. So, even though I always loved school and was good at it, as a college student, I wanted to be anything but! I thought my skills might make me a good lawyer. I engaged in several internships during college with a variety of legal entities—judges, high-powered law firms—and then even took the LSATs. But during my senior year, I really loved working on my undergraduate thesis on Little Women, and I did well at it. Also, even then, I found my academic work to be a conducive home for my many of my sustaining commitments: to social justice (at that time, feminism); expressive and critical culture; and meaningful and principled personal and inter-personal interactions. I also decided that I was morally uncomfortable with the adversarial justice system. So, what else was there to do? I applied to grad programs in Cinema Studies, got in, and even got scholarship support. I thought of grad school as a great opportunity to have focused activity in a cool place (New York City), and then, later, I could re-evaluate my professional path of not becoming a professor…

Read the full interview at Figure/Ground Communication™.