Princeton Weekly Bulletin February 1, 1999
Distinctive contributions
By Sally Freedman
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Elaine Showalter (back, c) with preceptors Kathryn Humphreys (back, l) and Lev Olsen; Mika Provata (middle, l), Gage McWeeny, Sally Bachner and Stuart Burrows; and Karen Beckman (front, l), Amada Sandoval and Barry McCrea (photo: Denise Applewhite)
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Established in 1990 by a gift from Lloyd Cotsen '50, the fellowship is awarded for a three-year term. It provides summer salary, a research grant of $5,000 and a book fund of $5,000 for each year, as well as support for two Cotsen Junior Fellows, who are graduate student assistants, for each fellow.
The current Cotsen fellows are Elaine Showalter, Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities, and Viviana Zelizer, professor of sociology.
Graduate student seminar
As Cotsen Fellow, Showalter developed a seminar on teaching for the graduate students who served this past fall as preceptors in Contemporary Fiction, a course with an enrollment of 350.
The seminar was "something I've been thinking about for years," she says, "but having the Cotsen gave me the opportunity and resources to focus on it in a much more intensive way, using the precepts as a kind of teaching lab." Showalter and a dozen preceptors "met for an hour and a half each Monday, to plan precepts and to discuss teaching methods and other professional issues. We had a reading list, and we kept an e-mail bulletin board with weekly individual reports on our precepts -- that was 28 precepts' worth of feedback a week."
Yes, she concedes, it was a terrific amount of work, but the preceptors were enthusiastic. "The seminar was very helpful," says Sally Bachner. "It lessened our sense of isolation as newly-minted teachers." "This was my first semester of teaching," says Karen Beckman, "and I had 65 students, so I was really glad to have a forum in which we could discuss basic questions. All the preceptors compiled a teaching portfolio as part of the seminar," she adds, "which will be useful for those of us entering the academic job market."
Showalter says she hopes to turn the experience into a textbook on teaching literature. "I've had some preliminary discussions with publishers," she says, "and there seems to be a lot of interest."
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"To be recognized for what we do as teachers is a great encouragement," says Zelizer of the Cotsen Fellowship.
She spent the past summer preparing an undergraduate course in Social Relations in the Economy, with junior fellows Kieran Healey and Brian Steensland. The course is to be taught this spring, Zelizer says, with "each of the junior fellows taking responsibility for one week, corresponding to their areas of research: Steensland on welfare economies, Healey on markets and human goods.
"One wonderful aspect of the project has been involving the graduate students in the creation of a course -- showing them the process at its earliest stages, exploring the many thematic possibilities, the alternative organizational structures, constructing a reading list and devising special projects."
As now developed, Zelizer says, "The course offers a sociological account of production, consumption, distribution and transfer of assets. Examining different sectors of the economy from corporations to households, immigrants, welfare and illegal markets, we'll explore how in all areas of economic life, people are creating, maintaining, symbolizing and transforming meaningful social relations. From this perspective, economic life is as social as religion, family or education."
Reading Television
Both Showalter and Zelizer are already planning the topics they intend to introduce in the second year of their Cotsen terms. Showalter is developing new courses on the American short story and on Hysterical Narratives (about "rumors and conspiracy theories and the way these things are perpetuated"). Zelizer is organizing a freshman seminar on the history and sociology of childhood, which will draw on such campus resources as the Cotsen Children's Library at Firestone Library and the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at the Woodrow Wilson School.
Showalter is also getting started with a course on Reading Television, working with junior fellows Amanda Sandoval and Paul Kelleher. They're identifying and buying videos -- "classics," says Showalter, "such as I Love Lucy, All in the Family, Masterpiece Theater and news shows, building up a strong collection, both of materials related to literature (author interviews, biographical documentaries, adaptations) and materials from the history of television." Showalter, who was TV critic for People magazine in 1996 and 1997, expects to offer Reading Television in the year 2000-01.
From Rutgers, Barnard
A member of the Princeton faculty since 1984, Showalter completed a three-year term as president of the Modern Languages Association on December 31, 1998. Among her numerous publications are Sister's Choice: Traditions and Change in American Women's Writing (1991) and Hystories (1997). She has edited four anthologies of criticism (including Speaking of Gender, 1989) and four of literary texts (including Scribbling Women, 1996), and written many reviews and articles for national newspapers and magazines, as well as more than 150 scholarly articles and essays. A graduate of Bryn Mawr, Showalter earned her PhD at the University of California, Davis and then was a member of the Rutgers faculty.
Zelizer, a native of Argentina, now a U.S. citizen, came to Princeton in 1988 from New York, where she was a professor at Barnard College and Columbia's Graduate Faculty. Her books include The Social Meaning of Money (1997) and Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985). A graduate of Rutgers, she earned her 1977 PhD at Columbia and joined the faculty at Barnard and Columbia in 1978.