​Special Feature: Mentee and Mentor:Lisa Vandenbossche and Katherine Mannheimer

Mentee: Lisa Vandenbossche, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, McNeese State University
Mentor: Katherine Mannheimer, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Rochester

Lisa on working with Katie:
1) How did you first connect with your mentor?
I began my doctorate program with the intention of specializing in Victorian literature. My very first class was Dr. Katherine Mannheimer’s 18th Century Literature course, and I was hooked. As I continued my graduate studies, Katie eventually became the Director of Graduate Studies who helped shape my professional career and an advisor on my dissertation who helped shape my research: she has pushed me to be a much better teacher and scholar.

2) What qualities set your mentor apart from others you’ve encountered along your path as a graduate student/early career academic?
On a professional level, Katie’s feedback (verbal and written) is hands down the best that I have ever received. Katie’s own scholarship is a model of what I want mine to look like. It is thoughtful and nuanced, as well as impeccably argued and researched. She pushes the work of those around her to match her own rigor as a scholar. She is unbelievably detail oriented, which comes across in both sentence-level language suggestions and in more global promptings. She challenges you to think carefully about arguments and evidence, in a way that is constructive and leads to much stronger final work.

On a personal level, Katie is always there to offer support. Unlike so many other mentors, she responds to emails quickly and goes out of her way to talk with you. Even when she is at her busiest, you don’t know it, because she rearranges her schedule to be available when you need advice the most. And her advice is spot on: I could not have navigated the complexity of a new job and pregnancy without her help.

3) Can you share an anecdote that captures your mentor’s personality/impact/sense of humor/anything special you’d like to highlight?
Katie had a baby twice during the time I was a graduate student (I don’t know if this says more about her timing or how long it took me to finish my degree…). This is not an easy thing to do while completing manuscript projects, teaching classes, becoming Director of Graduate Studies, etc. As a result, she taught all of us in the program an important lesson about work life balance, and helped us believe that we too could have families and academic careers.

One of my favorite memories in this regard was at a cohort meeting that we had with Katie in our fourth year. We were all sitting down for most of the meeting, so a lot of people did not realize that she was pregnant Toward the end of the meeting, someone dropped papers on the floor. Katie got up to pick them up, despite being really far along in her pregnancy. One of the men in my cohort expressed his surprise: “wow, what is that?” Not missing a beat, Katie answered, “a baby.” Writing about the exchange still makes me laugh. More than that, it is a moment that illustrates the strange position in which female faculty find themselves. Katie normalized the experience in a way that it often is not within academia, and she will always be my heroine for it. I hope that my students say that same thing about me.

4) How did your mentor influence your work in eighteenth-century studies, specifically? OR: What are some barriers, as you see it, to establishing positive mentorship relationships in higher education and/or eighteenth-century studies?
Early in my graduate program, I was applying for a fellowship to a Folger Shakespeare Library seminar. The personal statement required me to conceptualize a final dissertation project that was very much in its infancy at the time. Katie worked with me over the course of countless drafts and starts and stops. It was the most painful document I have ever created, and it ended up being one of my favorite articulations of what would become my dissertation project. What sticks with me the most when I think about this process is that Katie’s mother died during this period, yet she still found the time to shepherd me through this process. That fellowship kickstarted my own research and helped me find my place in the field.

My research is transoceanic in nature. I study narratives by and about sailors as a nexus between literature and reform movements in the 18th century. In order to make this work as a dissertation project, my committee consisted of advisors in British and American literature. This required a great deal of flexibility on behalf of faculty members. I could not have done it, if Katie hadn’t been willing to help me think outside the box in creating a project and then finding a committee who would support that project.

As Director of Graduate studies, Katie was instrumental in helping develop training opportunities for alternative career plans outside of academia for students. It was at her suggestion that I got involved helping with social media for the Women’s Caucus!

We all know how bad the academic job market is, and there is increasing pressure to rethink graduate studies as a result. One of the toughest roles for mentees of graduate students and early career scholars right now is helping them navigate this reality. Katie was realistic in acknowledging what this market looks like and in helping support skills that made students competitive both within and outside the academy. It is these outside skills that made me a more competitive applicant for teaching jobs. Just as importantly, however, I felt that Katie would support any decision that I made in my future career. I never felt pressure to find an academic job (or to only look at academic jobs), which I am grateful for. We need more mentors like her who are willing to do this kind of work.

5) As you continue in your own career as a scholar, what did you glean from your mentor that will guide your approach with your own students?
Academia can be an isolating place for graduate students and early career faculty, especially as you navigate your own teaching for the first time and you move away from the comfort of your
graduate program. One way to help with this is strong mentorship connections between established faculty and early career scholars. As we start first jobs, it can feel professional support networks from graduate school disappear (coupled with the fact that geographic displacement changes personal networks). Beyond professional connections, personal connections are vital. Mentors who take an interest (and acknowledge) the lives of their mentees outside of research and teaching help build community for young scholars when they need it most.

When my son was born, one of the first gifts that we received was a box of books from Katie; many of which are his favorite bed time stories. Every time I read them to him, I am reminded how lucky I am to have done graduate school under the guidance of a strong female mentor, and how grateful I am for this. I seek to be the same to my own graduate students, as they attempt to balance the demands of scholarship, teaching, and personal lives outside the classroom. Rather than ignoring those personal lives, I hope to be a voice who helps them navigate the complexities of these competing interests and be a support for important life events that occur in and outside of the classroom.

On a surface level, I also respond to emails far more quickly than I otherwise would have and work to match the level of feedback that I received from Katie, as I know how comforting that is on the other side of it! This may be the most important mentorship lesson that Katie taught me.

Katie on mentorship:
1. Identify three points in a graduate student's career when an advisor's/mentor's support is particularly important.
a. Just after the student's qualifying exams, there's a really crucial stock-taking that occurs, when students think back through everything they've read over the past months and start to draw connections, locate their true interests, and identify through-lines. Exam preparation itself is often fairly solitary, but this is the moment when a conversation can do so much.
b. I think many people would deem the first chapter of the dissertation to be the most fundamental one, or the intro/conclusion. But to me it seems like it's midway through the dissertation-writing process that's crucial: this is when students really start to figure out what the dissertation is about, and where it needs to go.
c. Another moment when mentorship is helpful, though perhaps not for the reasons we think of first, is at the Job-Market stage. Increasingly, I hope, we're coming to recognize that our conversations around post-PhD job options can't just be about what's the "best" job; we also have to address quality of life, institutional culture, community, family, and so on. I've had more than one conversation with female students in particular about how the sometimes circuitous route from post-doc to VAP to etc. intersects (or not) with one's ability to become a parent.

2. Specific steps I take as a mentor:
To me, some of the most helpful feedback an advisor can give, from early on, is around the larger intellectual stakes of a student's work. I suppose it's really less about feedback than about asking questions: OK, this is a great reading of this scene / stanza / etc., but what's the bigger picture? Helping students to articulate that is one of the most important (and enjoyable) roles that I think an advisor takes on.

3. What is one memorable aspect of your time working with Lisa?
One of the most memorable aspects of my time working with Lisa, truly, was how much she did without any help at all from me! She successfully applied for a grant to take a seminar at the Folger Library; she was selected to teach a course through the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies here at the University of Rochester; she received a Dissertation Prospectus Development Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council ... It was all totally amazing and had pretty much nothing to do with me.

4. How do I balance research and advising—any advice?
Ha. No advice; but I guess I'd just say I appreciate the way that advising graduate students forces you to read things you'd never have read otherwise. This doesn't advance my own research per se, but it helps me continue to broaden my knowledge of the long eighteenth century.

5. What is your current research focus?
I'm close (I hope) to finishing a book on Restoration drama and the rise of an eighteenth-century English canon in print.

Restoration dramatists were writing, of course, in the wake of a twenty-year period during which plays were widely reprinted and read, but not performed. My book considers how this lopsided access to drama affected how plays were written once the theatres reopened.

Specifically I argue that Restoration playwrights were uniquely aware of drama's "neither/nor" status as an artform that straddles page and stage, and that they leveraged this doubleness in their own plays in order to question print-centric notions of canonicity and "high" literary culture that had begun to emerge in the Interregnum years.