Jeremy Burns earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Arkansas in 2014. He studied American literature and culture after 1945, with a focus on post-apocalyptic fiction and film. After working for the university’s Office of Nationally Competitive Awards for several years, he is now Director of Communications for the Enrollment Services Division at the University of Arkansas.
(Note: The views expressed below are those of the individual and do not represent those of the University of Arkansas.)
COULD YOU BRIEFLY EXPLAIN HOW YOU WENT FROM WRITING A DISSERTATION ON POST-APOCALYPTIC SCIENCE FICTION TO WORKING WITH THE OFFICE OF ENROLLMENT SERVICES ON CAMPUS? WERE YOU ALWAYS PLANNING TO PURSUE AN ALT-AC CAREER, OR WERE YOU ORIGINALLY CONSIDERING THE TENURE-TRACK ROUTE?
While I was working on my dissertation, a graduate assistantship became available in the Office of Nationally Competitive Awards — an outfit on campus that helps students apply for graduate school scholarships like the Marshall and Rhodes — so I applied. A full-time position then opened in the same office and I was hired. By the time I wrapped up my dissertation and graduated, I’d fallen for the work — every day I was in the office, I had the chance to work with some of the best and brightest students on campus and had started to see them move on to incredible opportunities all over the world. It was good, meaningful work, and it felt enough like teaching that the transition was pleasant.
So, if we’re going to be completely honest, I have to say I originally planned on and hoped for tenure-track work. But as luck would have it, teaching opportunities dried up around the time I graduated, and I’ve ended up instead pursuing a different sort of career in higher education. As the conversation turns more and more to the value of preparing humanities students for alternative careers, I think it’s important to remember that as trained academics, we come out of the box ready to help in thoughtful and effectual ways with some of our society’s most pressing issues. That, to me, is an encouraging thought.
WHAT DO YOU LIKE BEST ABOUT WORKING IN UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION? WHAT ARE TWO SKILLS YOU DEVELOPED AS A DOCTORAL STUDENT THAT CONTINUE TO BE USEFUL TO YOU IN YOUR CURRENT JOB?
Working in university administration has its fair share of Terry Gilliam moments (I think of the clerks in Brazil), but for the most part, the people I find myself shoulder to shoulder with every day are genuinely and deeply committed to helping students, to promoting the value of education, and to working to elevate the community. These are noble goals, in my opinion, and their like are getting harder to find.
As a graduate student, I learned my fair share of skills, many of them intangible. From a practical standpoint, though, I feel that graduate students in the humanities learn a deep love of clarity and precise communication. They also learn — maybe from the hours and hours poured into reading novels and essays and cultural theory — how to be empathetic toward others. It turns out these are highly coveted business skills.
WHAT IS ONE PIECE OF ADVICE YOU WOULD GIVE NEW PH.D. STUDENTS IN ENGLISH AS THEY BEGIN DOCTORAL STUDY?
Ask for help. Spend some time speaking with your advisor, or with a professor you trust, and ask for help shaping your course of study. Take the time in these conversations to learn the shape of the industry — because industry it is — and start early getting strategies in place for making yourself useful to a future employer. This doesn’t mean selling your soul or giving up your abiding love of Proust. It means answering in life the three main questions of any good research project — “So what? So what? So what?”
WHAT DO YOU THINK GRADUATING PH.D. STUDENTS IN ENGLISH MUST KNOW BEFORE THEY GO ON THE JOB MARKET?
One of the smartest things I ever witnessed was a graduate peer of mine branching out to work at the intersections of rhetoric, feminism, and engineering. She waltzed into a tenure-track job and is, I assume, enjoying the fruits of her early labor. Before you hit the job market, know how your skills can make a university better, not just how you can illuminate the earliest poems by Blake. (By all means, learn to do both.)
THIS QUOTE COMES FROM YOUR DISSERTATION PROSPECTUS: “THE BODY IN THE WASTELAND, THEN, IS BOTH A FIGURE OF LIMITS–ALONG WITH THE FEARS, ANXIETIES AND CONTRADICTIONS THAT ENFORCE THOSE LIMITS–AND AN ALLEGORICAL FIGURE FOR THE PROMISE OF DIFFERENCE, OF POSSIBILITY AND–ULTIMATELY–OF HOPE. IT IS THROUGH THE MONSTERS OF THE WASTELAND THAT WE MIGHT BEGIN TO SEE OPPORTUNITIES FOR RENEWED AND REINVENTED COMMUNITY.” YOU DEFENDED BACK IN 2014. IS THERE A BOOK AND/OR FILM SINCE THEN THAT 1) YOU RECOMMEND AND 2) YOU FEEL FURTHER VALIDATES YOUR DISSERTATION ARGUMENT?
I spent a lot of time in 2013-2014 thinking about the body as a political space. It’s a testament to our current situation that I still have ample reason to reflect on what I learned then. We don’t really have to turn anymore to film to witness bodies up against the socio-political limits of the day. We have the news, and we can watch the protests.
We can debate the human cost of government actions regarding the ACA and transgender rights. Scholars have, for years now, made the point that the way we think about our bodies is emblematic of the way we think about ourselves as political subjects — this is, if I’ve got my facts straight, the central premise of biopolitics. Ultimately, what happens in politics and public policy has its final resting place in the space of the body. And, in the end, the body is inseparable from the politics of community, of health, of environment.
One film that I think illustrates this point is George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. Certainly, this film is 90% a V8-powered, post-apocalyptic chase movie. Watch it, though, with an eye to the attention it pays to politics of the body, and an allegory starts to trace out. There’s more in Max and Furiosa’s race through the wasteland than Miller’s outlandish dialogue and signature stunt work. The movie, to me, is as much about people who have been made to serve painful communal roles based on a brutal economy of bodies — they are War Boys and Brides who serve authority only by dying or giving birth. That they want to be and mean more than that seems entirely plausible, and it’s the central conflict of the film. What it has to teach us about our current situation is an open question, but it continues to serve me well to think carefully about the ways in which our socio-political choices create or extinguish possibilities for our bodies and our lives.