Jackie Bacon, '97

Jackie Bacon

Degree Information:

Ph.D., UT Austin, 1997
MA, UT Austin, 1990 and 1993
BA, UC Berkeley 1988

Ph.D. Title: “’The humblest may stand forth’: marginalized voices in abolitionist rhetoric”

Supervisor(s): Linda Ferreira-Buckley

Current Position: Independent Scholar

Recent Publications:

Freedom’s Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (Lexington Books, 2007)

“Descendents of Africa, Sons of ’76: Exploring Early African-American Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36 (2006). (Co-authored with Glen McClish)

“Reading the Reparations Debate,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003).

The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition (University of South Carolina Press, 2002)

Awards/Honors (at UT and after):

While in the English department at UT, I received an award from the Hanson Tufts Parlin Memorial Fund in 1993 toward travel expenses to attend the Fifth International D. H. Lawrence Conference in Ottawa, and the David Bruton, Jr. Fellowship, awarded by the University of Texas at Austin, in 1996.

My 1999 article “Taking Liberty, Taking Literacy: Signifying in the Rhetoric of African-American Abolitionists” in Southern Communication Journal (volume 64) received the Southern States Communication Association’s Rose B. Johnson Southern Communication Journal article award.

I was an alternate for National Endowment for the Humanities 1999-2000 Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars.

The Humblest May Stand Forth was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2002 by Choice magazine.

What’s it like to be an independent scholar? What are the benefits? The challenges?

Being an independent scholar is both wonderful and, at times, overwhelming. It is exciting to be able to pursue avenues of research and writing that interest me, and to follow research leads not knowing exactly how and when they will yield a final product. On the other hand, the lack of an outside system structuring my work (i.e. teaching schedule, tenure clock) means that I have to impose a structure on myself (schedules of goals and projects, for example) in order to avoid floundering without a direction.

The main benefit to me is flexibility both in terms of family and work. I have two small children, and the leeway that my work as an independent scholar gives me helps me to be able to work within my sons’ schedules as well as my own. Although I am by nature a big planner, always charting things out in advance, parenting necessarily involves changes to one’s plans. As an independent scholar, I have the freedom to do so. There is also flexibility and freedom in my own publication and research. One of the advantages of not having to worry about a tenure file is that I can publish in magazines that are political, or that are online, or that otherwise wouldn’t seem “scholarly” enough to a committee.

The main challenge is that my lack of institutional affiliation is often misunderstood or misjudged. Since my path is a nontraditional one, I have come to expect some confusion about what I am doing. Yet it is trying at times to continually be asked to explain why I am doing what I’m doing and to try to let people know that this path is right for me. Some people assume that my independent scholar status has resulted from failed searches or an inability to teach; others assume this is merely temporary. Editors at times seem to worry that I might not be connected enough in the discipline or that someone without institutional backing lacks credibility. I work hard to disprove these assumptions by keeping up with the discipline and contributing to it in various positive ways (peer reviewing, attending conferences, etc.)

What are your academic interests? What courses or resources at UT helped you develop them?

One of my major areas of study is African-American rhetoric and history. More generally, I am interested in the ways that people who are marginalized use rhetoric and language to fight for social justice and to empower themselves. Learning about nineteenth-century rhetoric at UT from Linda Ferreira-Buckley gave me the necessary foundations for understanding the rhetoric of antebellum social activists, both black and white. Michael Winship’s class on archival methods was invaluable, teaching me not only how to do archival research (which has been central to my work) but also how to follow paths that may seem to go in new and indeterminate directions and to alter my assumptions as I discover new information.

What was the most important lesson you learned from your experience as a grad student at UT?

I learned to always be open to reformulating my ideas and to challenging my assumptions. While I was a grad student, if I had an idea for a paper or turned in a draft of an essay, it was always given serious consideration, critique, and editing. Professors expected a lot from us, and they let us know that they took the task of making us into professionals seriously. This has been extremely valuable to me in working with editors, who often critique harshly even those essays that they like and want to see published eventually. From my experiences at UT, I learned that I should not let myself be overly intimidated by such responses and should not give up. As a grad student, I gained confidence that I could rise to the challenge of rewriting and rethinking an idea or an article and the courage to resubmit my writing.

Looking back on your experience here, what would you say was most valuable or unique the rhetoric program?

The professors in rhetoric are very approachable and treat graduate students as future peers. This is evident not only in the way they handle our work, as I note above, but in their openness to meeting with graduate students regularly and to discussing with them their future careers. Also, the professors and students in rhetoric at UT are a social, fun bunch who don’t take themselves too seriously; whenever we got together to study or to socialize, it was always friendly, open, and unpretentious.

What advice would you offer prospective graduate students in rhetoric?

Since rhetoric is a subject that depends upon broad understandings of language and context, take advantage of the wide range of classes offered in the UT English Department and in other departments, like Communication or History. Think of rhetoric expansively—not only as theories of persuasion or as histories of public discourse, but as a means for people to achieve self-determination, to fight for their own freedom and that of others, and to engage and improve the world. This approach allows scholars and teachers of rhetoric to make others see how important it is (and to counter the negative associations often popularly made about rhetoric). I believe it also calls us as teachers and scholars to use our own understandings of rhetoric to help others in various ways—using our skills in the public sphere on civic issues, helping students to value their own voices, or listening and responding critically to public pronouncements.

Michael Chorost, '00

Michael Chorost

Degree Information:

Ph.D., UT Austin, 2000
MA, UT Austin, 1988
BA, Brown University, 1987

Dissertation Title: “Designing Online Environments to Facilitate Classroom Management and Student Collaborative Work”

Supervisor(s): John Slatin

Current Positions: Freelance writer, teacher, and public speaker.

Recent Publications:

Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin, 2005)

“My Bionic Quest for Boléro”, Wired Magazine, November 2005. Subsequently reprinted in The Best American Science Writing 2006.

“Risky Enough Business?”, The Scientist, February 8, 2006.

“The Mind-Programmable Era”, The Futurist, May-June 2006.

“The 22nd Century”, PBS pilot, airdate January 17, 2007.

Awards/Honors (at UT and after):

First Prize, Innovative Instructional Technology Award Program (IITAP), 1998

PEN/USA Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, 2006

Numerous positive reviews for Rebuilt in publications such as the L.A. Times, The London Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Village Voice, Business Week, Reader’s Digest, and many other journals.

You’ve been doing a book tour. What’s that been like?

Book tours are tremendously overstimulating. You’re constantly on the go, eating overly rich restaurant food, talking to interesting people, and having to be “on” for press interviews and bookstore readings. I loved it, though I was often too overstimulated to fall asleep at a decent hour and wound up being exhausted much of the time. One of my “minders” actually let me go to her house and take a nap at one point, because I literally couldn’t stay awake. But it was a wonderful experience and I’ll never forget it.

Obviously, winning the 2006 PEN/USA award is a major achievement. What other accomplishments in your career are you most proud of?

I’m very proud of the fact that I’m making it in San Francisco as a freelancer. Just the fact that I have steady work and am staying on top of the bills is a major accomplishment. I love having the freedom to do what I want, when I want. I’m also very happy that I’m finding the sense of friendship and community here that eluded me in most of the other places I’ve lived. I have an office in a writers’ collective, and San Francisco is the kind of place where I can walk downtown and bump into people I know.

And another wonderful perk of my life is that publishing my book was like getting a Golden Ticket into that world where writers talk among themselves. I’ve gotten to meet and correspond with so many writers that I admire. It’s thrilling to be part of that national discourse.

What are your academic and professional interests, and how did they evolve? How did your work at UT help you develop them?

My academic career’s evolved in surprising ways. I did my masters’ in Renaissance Drama at UT, then went to Duke intending to do my doctorate there in the same topic. But that didn’t work out, so five years later I returned to UT because in my absence they had developed a terrific program in using computers to support teaching in the humanities. That was much more closely aligned with my interests, since I loved writing software, teaching, and literature. I taught myself a programming language (ColdFusion) and developed an elaborate website to support online collaboration and classroom management. Essentially, I wrote Blackboard before Blackboard existed. That’s what I won the IITAP award for, and I wrote my dissertation on how such software aligned with constructivist teaching methodology. While I was writing that, in 1999, a dot-com in San Francisco offered me a job in interface design, and it was too tempting to turn down. I thought it was going to make me rich, and it would have, if I’d joined a year earlier and cashed in my stock options while the stock was at its peak. Alas, the job was a disaster, the company was in chaos, and it tanked in 2000. So much for that. I found another job as an educational specialist at a research institute in Silicon Valley and defended my dissertation at the very end of 2000. Then I abruptly went totally deaf in July 2001 and got a cochlear implant, and that pushed my career in an entirely new direction. I found an agent, got a book contract, and wrote Rebuilt – a memoir of the experience – over the next three years. A good deal of the book was literary-theoretical, discussing things like Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg. Its publication opened up all sorts of new opportunities, from writing for Wired and PBS to traveling the country as a paid speaker. In early 2005 I quit my job and went entirely freelance. Now I consider myself a science writer. I still do consulting in educational technology, but it’s only one of many things I do.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in your graduate career in rhetoric?

Seriously? Addiction to computer games. Writing a dissertation can be a very tedious, lonely experience. Playing Quake and Half-Life was far more exciting, and I got addicted – literally – to the dopamine/testosterone rush of blowing away alien monsters. I would say it took me six months longer than it should have to finish my dissertation because of those games. I finally quit cold turkey, and now I no longer play any computer games. I don’t even have solitaire on my computer.

Looking back on what you learned here, what was most valuable?

Unquestionably, the single most valuable thing I learned was how to write a dissertation. That set me up really well for writing my first book. In a dissertation, you have to learn how to sustain an argument over 200 pages. You have to learn how to build other people's arguments into your own. You have to think about how each chapter contributes to the whole. You have to learn how to do formatting and citation consistently in a document of that length. Once you complete a project of that scale, it becomes that much easier to think big thoughts. All those things helped me immensely in writing my first book. I’m very grateful to my dissertation chair, John Slatin.

What advice would you offer prospective graduate students in rhetoric?

The biggest piece of advice I’d give is not to lock oneself into assuming that only one kind of future is possible. Given the always-parlous state of the job market, the dream of getting a tenure-track job at a prestigious university is not always realistic. But the world is full of opportunities for people who are smart, creative, and entrepreneurial. Look at my life: I’ve failed exams, I’ve been canned, I’ve gone deaf. My life is not even remotely similar to the traditional one I envisioned when I was applying to graduate schools in 1987. But I’m far better off in life because I’ve consistently taken risks and tried new things.

To learn more about Michael's life and work, visit his website at http://www.michaelchorost.com.