Episode 2.2 – Dr. Jana Remy

Is there something that’s emergent right now?
It might be an approach or something within your discipline – but something that is part of the cultural milieu right now that you might latch on to yourself and use that to augment where your career trajectory may be headed.

Dr. Jana Remy

Overview

Dr. Jana Remy joins KHC to chat about digital humanities and shares insight in navigating careers beyond the tenure track.

Show Notes

Episode Transcript

Spencer Gomez  00:10

Welcome to the Krieger Hall Chronicles, the podcast that invites to scholars affiliated with UC Irvine’s History Department to share their diverse professional work as activists, historians, and public intellectuals. We’re your hosts, Spencer Gomez and Stephanie Narrow, and today we have a very special episode of KHC.

Stephanie Narrow  00:29

That’s right, Spencer. So UCI’s Career Development for Historians Program invited alumna, Dr. Jana Remy, to speak with current history graduate students about her own post-PhD career trajectory. And so what follows today is a recording from that event, and it was moderated by Professor of History Dr. David Igler, with discussion between Dr. Remy and yours truly.

Dr. David Igler  00:54

I’m David Igler from the Department of History and it’s my pleasure to introduce our speaker [Dr. Jana Remy] and our conversationalist, Stephanie Narrow. So Professor Jana Remy leads the Educational Technology Services Division at Chapman University. In this role, she works with faculty, administration, and campus IT departments to ensure that both digital and physical learning environments are functional, accessible, and well supported. She also serves as the Co-Director of the Institute for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and is Co-Chair of the Advisory Group for Disability and Accessibility. She teaches courses in environmental history, the history of disability, and digital humanities at Chapman University. Last but certainly not least, she’s a graduate of UCI from the Department of History where she not only wrote a marvelous dissertation, but as she was beginning to write her dissertation, she made the decision to educate herself about career alternatives, specifically in the online, digital world. And by the time she had graduated, she was a noted expert in the field of digital humanities. So it’s a great pleasure to welcome Jana virtually back to campus. Today’s conversation will be led by History Department doctoral students Stephanie Narrow, who is also the Program Officer for the History Department’s Career Development Program. Welcome again, Jana. And Stephanie, take it away.

Stephanie Narrow  02:32

Thank you, everybody, for taking this afternoon to come and join us. Jana, I’m really excited to have you here and learn a bit more about sort of your professional life, both leading up to grad school while you’re here at UCI, and then, most importantly, in your post-PhD life. So to start start us off, I was wondering, so upon entering graduate school here at UCI, what ideas about career prospects did you have? Or what did you envision for yourself for your post-PhD life? In that regard, were there any experiences specifically here during your time at UCI that helped shape some of those ideas?

Dr. Jana Remy  03:07

All right, so let me start kind of by telling you a little bit what happened before I applied to graduate school, because I think it leading into that kind of tells you a little bit of my story. So I not only got my PhD from UC Irvine, but I also got my undergraduate degree from UC Irvine. And I thought I was pre-med, I studied biological sciences and got a degree in biology. I had a minor in English, I had an interest in the humanities, but I thought it wasn’t a terrifically practical area of study. Then I found myself for about eight years not working, I was actually raising a family and not in an academic milieu. And once I decided I wanted to return to school, I really didn’t quite know what I wanted to do. And so I had this minor in English and I thought, well, maybe I’ll go back and finish a second bachelor’s degree, kind of dip my toes in the water right and get a get back into academia again. And so that was my intention. Actually, when I returned to UCI, I was taking non-matriculating classes, thinking I would go into the English Department. And I ended up shifting gears because what happened was just at that time that I was doing that work, I ended up meeting a faculty member in the History Department, who’s now deceased, his name is Dave Bruce, and he took me under his wing and I started realizing what was kind of important was maybe not to just choose a major but to find faculty that you really click with. And to realize that I could do a lot of things in history, just like I could do a lot of things in English, and finding out what kind of a right fit for the program, and that the department is interested in me was maybe the most important thing for me to do. So I ended up applying as a history student and you know, I actually never took a history class as an undergraduate. I had A.P.ed out of all of that. And so I kind of was a little bit flying blind, I think, but I think why will I think that’s important to my story was I had this ambition of wanting to go to graduate school. But I didn’t quite know what yet, I hadn’t connected all the dots. During the time before I went to graduate school, I had dabbled quite a bit in playing on the internet. That was my hobby. And I built websites and I blogged and I did some, you know, just kind of played, I guess, is the best way to describe it. And I hadn’t really thought when I went to graduate school, that that would be really a factor. Because it’s studying history for crying out loud, right, not technology or the internet. But what I found as I was taking classes, is I was thinking all the time about how the internet, which I saw as a very, it was something – [a] revolutionary kind of platform. And now, you know, that seems self evident, but it wasn’t at the time. And I was realizing there was so much potential in using technology for scholarly expression, scholarly communication, and also just totally changing the research process. So when I started graduate school, people were still using note cards and research journals, you know, like physical paper things. And, you know, I was thinking, I want to take my digital camera into the archives and take pictures instead of paying for copies. And that was just a radical idea at that time. Now, I feel like I’m really dating myself, but it’s not that long ago was in the, like, early 2000s. So I started making these connections and realizing, like, my fascination with technology could be something that was just inevitable that I would bring to my scholarship, and scholarship and my scholarly activity. And I think what happened was more and more, I was very shy about sharing that, or even kind of revealing the depth of my interest in technology as a history graduate student. But more and more I kind of revealed that and where it actually sort of ended up, I think, kind of exploding was I took a class with Jeff Wasserstrom. And he mentioned in that class, something about wanting to start a blog called – and he named this blog China Beat or he talked about wanting to start a blog called China Beat, And I kind of like raised my hand, I said something about blogging. Because I’ve been blogging for several years, I actually started my blog in 2000, like when we were hand coding them before there was even a platform like Blogger, WordPress. And so that is, I think, that was the first time I admitted [to blogging] – because I had been blogging under an alias – in a graduate course that this was something that was really important to me. And what he encouraged me to do shortly thereafter was actually to start a podcast. And in that podcast, which was called the Making History podcast – and I don’t make, I don’t run it anymore; I started in, I think, 2005 or 2006 – in that podcast [I] had the opportunity to, or I sought, the opportunity to interview scholars about the way that they wrote and their research process. [Which] was kind of like the stories behind the projects. And I exploited all of my relationships to help connect me to people they knew that had new books coming out or new things that they wanted to talk about. And that podcast helped me as someone who is a graduate student at UC Irvine – at that time, you know, not a huge name school, though UCI has a great reputation – really amplify my capacity to network, and I was able to meet fantastic scholars, and they became also, you know, that was relationship building that ended up investing kind of in my future, too. And it opened other doors for me. I guess that’s kind of a long way of saying I had no idea what I was gonna do when I started, I had kind of this meandering path. But I think what I learned was, and probably many of you have this sense, too, is you might be studying a certain discipline or a certain topic, but maybe what you can really add to the discipline is something else, right. You’re gonna bring some other idea together some of their skill to the forest, and that can help distinguish you and your scholarship. So you’re not just doing that one specialized, narrow topic. But also I would say, adding to that too, is I happen to, kind of, have had the opportunity to ride this leading wave of the internet [which] really changing the way that we do things in academia. And some things haven’t changed. But you know, I was very fortunate in the timing of that. And I think I might have you also think about, is there something else that’s emergent right now. And it might be an approach or something within your discipline, but something that is, is kind of part of the cultural milieu right now that you might latch on to yourself and use that to augment kind of where your career trajectory may be headed.

Stephanie Narrow  09:18

So it’s interesting that you talk about while you’re in graduate school, wanting to do all these different things: helping Jeff with China Beat, starting a podcast. And you know, speaking as a graduate student, I feel like there’s a lot of hesitation because we feel, or at least if I can just speak for myself, that we don’t feel like we have the credentials to start something new. That we have a lot of intellectual curiosity, but sometimes that curiosity just stays in the intellectual part and is not sort of translated into exploring different professional opportunities or different ways of doing history. But I think that’s a really valuable skill set to have, is feeling empowered to a certain extent, of feeling like you can take a leap and try something knew. And so do you think that’s, sort of, as important as having, you know, expertise in different types of DH skill sets or different professional skill sets? What do you think about the importance of having sort of appropriate mental attitude – or maybe not appropriate mental attitude – but having the outlook where it’s okay to try and fail or to try something new?

Dr. Jana Remy  10:22

I think it’s, it’s hard because I think in graduate school, we want to show our best selves and be as polished as possible. And I would say, at any professional stage of our careers, you know, certainly that inclination exists. But actually, what I model in the digital humanities class that I teach to graduate students at Chapman University is actually modeling trying and struggling and failing. I kind of joke with my students, like, I’m just waiting for the first time we can bring down a server, because that’s when things get really exciting, because then we got to bring it back up, you know, or figure out what we did that lead to that problem. I think one of the challenges about graduate school is we’re trying to reproduce the excellence of the faculty that we’re, you know, working with. And in some sense, we need to experiment to try our own way, and not just follow in their footsteps. And I think it’s to our benefit, when we’re experimental. I would say my dissertation ended up being rather experimental, because I was talking a lot about digital research methods, as well as producing a piece of scholarship. And what I learned from that was, you know, it’s not perfect. If I had wanted a perfect dissertation, I would still be a graduate student, I wouldn’t actually have ever left the campus. And I, and I read an article, it’s actually a really excellent piece by Kathleen Fitzpatrick – who’s a digital humanities scholar, and she’s worked with the MLA for several years, I can’t remember where she’s at right now. But she talked about how the dissertation needs to be a messy practice, right? It’s, it’s really trying something new. It’s making your mark, your scholarly mark on the world. And it shouldn’t look like what other people have done. It should be yours. But I have to say, it’s really risky to do that, too. And so having people around you who can support that kind of experimentation is important. I just kind of had an experience with a graduate student on my campus that I was advising that did a digital humanities project. And, you know, as we were, she was defending her thesis and said, you know, the best, you know, people are pointing out some problems with it. You know, some of the people in that defense, I said, you know, the best thesis is one that has a lot of possibilities for where it might go in the future. It’s not a closed product, right? It has a lot of potential. And so I said, you know, these questions are valid, you need to take this critique and think seriously about it. But then think about what’s next, like, let that be your driving question. What, what about this critique are you going to take and run with and then make better and move on with? Anytime you can in graduate school – this is maybe speaking more to the faculty than to the students – but you can lead from above, right. You can push your faculty to foster that sense of experimentation. And I would say I did get that at UC Irvine. And several of my classes – I took a class with Jeff Wasserstrom, that I mentioned before, I took a class with a faculty member who’s no longer at UC Irvine, and with Mike Davis. It was about writing history, that was really fantastic. And he gave great feedback on the work that I was doing. I also took some classes in the Anthropology Department because I, as an Americanist, I could choose another discipline in lieu of another level of a language to learn. And the classes I took in anthropology were just mind blowing. To me, it was just so interesting to work with the faculty there. And we were reading some experimental anthropology, really recent scholarship, and it was really, super exciting to get that opportunity.

Stephanie Narrow  13:36

Well, in thinking about the dissertation, you actually started working at Chapman while in the last two years of your PhD here at UCI. So you were balancing this new position as the Associate Director of Instructional Technology at Chapman, while finishing up your dissertation. Which I think for a lot of us PhD students, we’re sort of told that, okay, well, you need to finish your dissertation, or the dissertation needs to be 90% done, before you think about going on the job market. Or it needs to be sort of at that stage before you think about what’s next. So how was it like for you balancing this new career while also finishing your dissertation? And what was it like, you know did you have support so your mentors who were encouraging you to pursue this job while you were still sort of in the process of getting through your PhD?

Dr. Jana Remy  14:20

No. Yes, okay – so let me explain what happened.

Dr. David Igler  14:25

Careful! I’ll just say, careful!

Dr. Jana Remy  14:28

My circumstances were unusual. And, and what happened was I didn’t go on the job market two years before I finished my dissertation. Chapman actually came to me, or someone at Chapman came to me, and offered me a role. And, and I want to explain kind of how that happened. I was at a position where I had maxed out my possibilities for having T.A. positions, and I had also applied for a year of external funding to help tide me over. And I knew that that year was almost up and I was in a financial circumstance where I couldn’t really, I didn’t have the luxury to just easily write checks for graduate school. I worked my whole way through to get paid either through earning fellowships or through T.A.ing. So that was, that was ending. And I was getting really nervous because I didn’t want to quit. But I knew I was at a financial crossroads. So what I did was I started talking to anyone and everyone I knew and said, “I’m looking for work, I’m looking for something to do that I can do while I finish my dissertation.” You know, I didn’t want a full time job, but I wanted something. And I didn’t know if that would be working for a nonprofit, or if it would be, you know, professional tutoring or something. Like, I was cobbling together some ideas for what I could do. And I actually met a woman at a Christmas party who had just been hired on at Chapman University, and one of her tasks was to help build the digital humanities division at the school. And you know, it’s one of those random things that happens, but it wouldn’t have happened except that I had been telling everyone I could that I’m looking for something and talking about my work. And I’m sure everyone around me was exhausted about hearing about this weird digital humanities stuff. And so what happened – so I met her at this party, she told me, “I’m starting a reading group at Chapman around digital humanities, would you like to come?” Now, when I was at UC Irvine, I actually don’t think I even knew that Chapman University existed. It’s a small private school up the 55 [freeway], not too far from Disneyland. And so I would go like, once a month to her little reading group at her campus. And I think, you know, I was just interested in talking to people who spoke my language, most of all. At UC Irvine, at that time, I didn’t have a robust digital humanities community, I was sort of alone most of the time in my peculiar interest. And so what ended up happening is she, someone in her office actually went on long term medical leave. And so she said, “Well, it’s not full time work. And it’s, you know, would you want to come work part time for me while he’s on medical leave?” And I said sure. And I actually didn’t tell David [Igler], who was my advisor at that time, that I took that work, because I was nervous. I knew, I knew him well enough to say he would probably advise me against it, because it would be distracting to finishing my scholarship, but I also had the reality of needing money. And, you know, I don’t know how many non-traditional students you have, you know, or are listening on this call. But I was a non-traditional student, I was raising teenagers and/or preteens. At that point, I had to be practical. Also, shortly after I took the position at Chapman, I ended up divorcing my spouse. And so I knew, you know, all these personal factors are kind of external, but they’re not, right. I knew I wanted to continue my schooling. And I had to be very practical because of my family and personal circumstances to be able to do that. And I know not everyone has those same factors in their lives. But there’s probably other things in your life that are pushing you in one direction or another. I’m very deeply practical about money. I want money, I don’t want to be starving, you know, I don’t like being hungry. And so at some point, you have to be practical about your career choices and strategic. So I took this role at Chapman thinking at first, it would just be temporary. [But] the person I was filling in for didn’t come back. And also in the meantime, I recognize this was an area that was a good fit for me, my interest in technology, my love for academia, my interest in scholarship. Like I was able to bring all of these things and into this role. So I’ve had this – now, I’ve been at Chapman for 10 years. And in that 10 years, I’ve had four promotions. I started in Offices 2 at the bottom rung, now I’m leading a team of over 10 people and three divisions. I’ve doubled, more than doubled my income in those 10 years. And I’ve provided a lot of financial stability for my children, who’ve now themselves graduated from college and have started their adult lives. And I was able to support myself through a divorce and through a lot of life changes. So for me, I had to be very practical about that. Because, you know, history is not always the – we know there can be hundreds of applicants for every [academic] job. But it wasn’t just a practical decision. I wasn’t just taking a job that I wouldn’t like. I was like, I didn’t know that job even existed till I had that opportunity and realized, oh, this uses all of me, right? This isn’t just a piece. And I’m really fortunate at Chapman, I now teach people how to teach. I enjoy teaching. I love teaching actually. And I think even when I was a grad student, maybe to my detriment, I enjoyed teaching a little too much. Because again, that can be a distraction from scholarship. So now I teach faculty how to teach better using technology and I love doing that work. And I love the technology that I get to use to enhance the educational experience of the students. And I’m still doing scholarship, I’m still teaching my students. I teach graduate classes as well as undergraduate classes at the university.

Stephanie Narrow  19:39

So you were really at the forefront of digital humanities, you know, as it was taking shape. And before we probably even had an idea of what digital humanities actually was. And you know that definition and that meaning is always changing, and it differs based on where you are and who’s doing that type of work. But it seems like your interest in technology and digital tools really was part of who you were – like you said, as part of your whole person, not just a part of you as a scholar, but part of you and your own personal interest as well. So how important was it for you to find a career that really not only lent itself to you for you using that, but also in a career where you could expand upon some of that knowledge?

Dr. Jana Remy  20:24

Well, you know, I don’t have like – I’ve asked myself what – kind of counterfactual [question], like, what if I hadn’t taken the job at Chapman? Or what if I had said no, I’m gonna hold out for a faculty position, you know, and tenure-track, traditional faculty? Well, and I don’t know, you know, I don’t know what that would have looked like. But I think what I do know is, it’s not, I think it’s to all of our benefit to network quite a bit. And in that networking, talk to people about the choices they made with their careers, because I bet if you were to survey any of the faculty at UC Irvine, and they would tell you about moments in their career where they made very pragmatic choices, and even maybe left an opportunity behind or, you know, I don’t think those conversations actually happen enough. We just assume it’s this beautiful, logical streamline story to tenure track faculty member. I actually remember a podcast episode that I did – see, I was learning from my podcast, as much as you know, I was just enjoying the experience – with Rachel O’Toole, who I think is still at UC Irvine. And I was asking her specifically about how she got funding for a project that she just finished. I don’t think it was a book, maybe it’s an article. And she talked about how that article came from its original idea to being completed. And in that podcast, she talked about, I got this funding for a few hundred dollars, and I traveled to this archive, and then I went to this residence fellowship, and I got this. And she talked about this jigsaw of money and time that she got in order to be able to do this piece of scholarship. And it just, it was kind of like this huge lightbulb to me to hear this meandering story. Because you don’t you see a finished article, you don’t know what went into it, right. And so I think that’s when I started thinking, you know, I don’t have to have this just linear path to what I’m imagining for myself. Like this tenure track job, like life is going to take me a lot of different places, and I need to exploit opportunities. And she talked about really distinct ways that she exploited opportunities that weren’t quite a fit, but had a little bit of money. So she did it anyways. And then she said, you know, how it worked out. And I think that’s kind of, you know, being able to have those seeds in my mind of how I might, all these possibilities might build into something satisfying in the end is really important. So I wish that we had more of those opportunities to tell those stories about and even the things that were maybe even dead ends that didn’t end up working. I think it was an article I saw by Kenneth Pomeranz while he was the President of the AHA (American Historical Association). And he talked about boxes of scholarship that he had stacked up in his office, like the boxes that he thought he would return to, but never did. You know, they’re like these possibilities of avenues of things, kind of the dead ends that you don’t follow. And then the ones that you do, and I think hearing those stories, and even that I remember those from several years ago, because they stuck with me. Like sometimes you need to imagine or follow a little path and see if it’s going to be a dead end or if it’s going to be- or maybe it loops back around to where you started from. You don’t know. So opening yourself to those possibilities, I think is really important. And also listening to lots of other people’s stories of how their career started and got them to where they are. Because I didn’t know what I do existed when I started graduate school, I’d never even heard of digital humanities when I started graduate school. You know, I just started reading and thinking and learning and opening ideas and talking to people. And that’s how I started finding my people and my path.

Stephanie Narrow  23:38

Well, and again, I think that goes back to this idea of curiosity and opening yourself up to try things out and fail. And like you said, there’s, you know, sort of our template is the tenure track faculty member, because that’s who we’re surrounded by, that’s the person who is our advisor. But I think, you know, to reiterate what you said, of thinking about what’s emergent in your field? Or what are some of the possibilities of things you can and maybe cannot yet imagine, I think is really important to thinking about sort of our the totality of our professional selves, and how it melds into also thinking about who we are as people. And as you know, yes, I’m a scholar, and I guess I’m a historian, but I’m also all these other things. And you know, my identity, as a historian is only part of who I am and how do I fit into a career pathway or to post-PhD life in a way that you know, checks a bunch of different boxes, not just my intellectual ones, but other things. And so I wanted to start to get us towards the Q&A, but I wanted to ask you just one last question. What piece of advice or what words of wisdom would you offer to current graduate students now who are interested in pursuing, you know, perhaps, non-traditional career pathways? So maybe it’s something in higher ed admin, maybe it’s something [like] working for a tech company, maybe it’s just something that’s not the tenure track? What would you encourage graduate students to consider or to do to open themselves up to those types of possibilities?

Dr. Jana Remy  25:02

Well, I would say, you know, keep the door open, you don’t know what might happen. I actually hire in my divisions people all the time, right, that are themselves graduate students or recent graduates, and who realized that it could be very interesting to do academic technology work, which is helping faculty learn how to use tools for teaching, as opposed to, you know, becoming faculty themselves. For a whole variety of reasons that can offer more life flexibility, sometimes a lot more pay, which could be a factor and that sort of thing. But I would say one thing that’s hard is when I was a graduate student, I felt like I had this magical, like, imaginary committee sitting like, over my shoulder, you know, like, you see the little angel who felt like at every point, I was making these decisions, and I’m not speaking like to my advisor, specifically, but like this imaginary tenure committee, 10 years in the future, or 15 years in the future, like everything I was doing was somehow I was accountable to that magical committee or that imaginary committee. And at one point, I was like, I [don’t] want to live my life, according to some imaginary committee, I’m sick of this. Like, I just said, Okay, bye. You know, it’s like, my committee went out the door. And I said, I have to, like, you know, it’s my life, I need to take control and be kind of true to who I am. And I knew that following this kind of path, with this imaginary group of people judging me at every point, wasn’t going to allow me to enjoy the process and be true to myself. And I think sometimes I felt like a little bit of a rebel, like I was doing things underground or kind of sneaky or something, because I wasn’t like doing it the right way. But I actually adopted a little motto for myself, which I don’t know if this would have traction for anyone there, but maybe think of someone. So I actually adopted someone who was a real life person. And a couple of points in my career path I asked myself, “What would Mike Davis do?” And that’s really a dangerous thing. I don’t know if you know who Mike Davis was. But he was teaching at UC Irvine at that point in time. And I thought, but if I like you – and he’d had a very interesting life, and it was a little bit of a rebel himself – and I thought, you know, to me that that kind of encapsulate this notion of, of taking opportunities as they come and being myself as opposed to living for these academics who I thought I probably would never please. Like, I had nothing about my life up to that point had been, you know, according to that model, and so I didn’t know I would ever fit into that box that they would want to put me into. So it was much more freeing for me. Maybe I would suggest, you know, picking, it could be someone that you admire, follow their their story or their career paths. Someone else that I interviewed for my podcast that had a huge impact on me was [I]  interviewed Laurel Thatcher Ulrich who’s a historian and who wrote the  Midwives Tale. And hearing her career path and how she did her scholarship, her early scholarship, really helped me to recognize – she was blending family responsibilities with academic responsibilities. And also was telling stories that people up to that point in time, telling women stories, that weren’t really considered reputable scholarship up to that point in time. That seems silly to us now, but that was true. So when I talked to her about that era of her life, it gave me a lot of comfort that sometimes doing things your own way, and making it work for you is more important than trying to imagine how, you know, how you can fit yourself into someone else’s model. And I just knew that’s not what I wanted. So I would say know yourself, think about yourself. You know, my best advice: and if I were to give advice to anyone who’s kind of in academia right now, and I’d say this to my grad students, too, I would say if you enjoy teaching, learn how to teach online, because of this moment that we’re in right now, not just post-pandemic, I think there’s going to be a huge shift because academia has kind of exploded, right, this idea of, of needing a teacher in a classroom, you know, we’ve we’ve sort of left that behind the last year. And so if you can become really skilled at teaching online – that means designing course materials, as well as delivering course materials and giving students good feedback on assessments – that’s gonna help you quite a bit in your journey through academia, and may open possibilities to you. It might, it might not open that magical tenure track box, but it might. Because I think right now, that’s really critically important to the academy to have instructors who can teach really well online. So just my little tidbit as I’m, you know, kind of being prophetic about what the future of education holds.

Stephanie Narrow  29:16

No, and I know that there are some people on this call too, who are scholars of pedagogy and who love teaching and so I think that’s very useful advice. Thank you so much, Jana, for sharing everything. It was really wonderful to hear from you.

Spencer Gomez  29:32

To learn more about this podcast, including access to transcripts, show notes, and resources related to today’s episode, please visit our website at sites.uci.edu/KriegerHallChronicles. For the Krieger Hall Chronicles. I’m Spencer Gomez, and I’m Stephanie Narrow, and thanks for tuning in.