Due to a perfect storm of medical crises and an uptick in ongoing workplace toxicity from a few academic bullies in the English Dept. on the Pace New York City campus (the unavoidable counterpart to my department, the Dept. of English, Writing, and Cultural Studies on Pace Pleasantville), AY 2025 has been unparalleled hell. I’m surprised their behavior hasn’t caused my death yet, but it’s certainly triggered extremely dangerous episodes, to the point my cardiologist expressed concern.
I’ve spent most of this year trying to survive, and the time, labor, and energy of survival has left me with little for anything else, particularly two commitments I used to try to foreground: leaving behind evidence, and modeling self-celebration as a disabled rhetorician, for others in the field and for myself.
So, new resolution for Summer 2026 and onward: I’m going to try to resurface these commitments and use them to ground my academic identity, no matter how abusive those NYC-ENG bullies and Pace University administrators get.
Thus, without further ado, Kairos announced the winners of the 2026 Kairos Awards today, and I won the Kairos Best Webtext Award for “perimortem [in (theoretical) rigor]”!
And, though it feels strange to announce given the amounts of physical and psychological harm Pace has perpetrated on me and other women and faculty of color: I was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor, effective AY 2026!
Not that precarity ever stopped me, but I’m certainly excited to be less precarious while speaking out, and I’m definitely thrilled to be tenured in my department, with colleagues who get me and who are an absolute intellectual and emotional joy to work with. Appa always said the department you end up in matters more than the institution, i.e. because all institutions are just same bullshit, different place, and mostly he’s right–the only difference being I’m not sure there is an institution quite as dysfunctional and willfully self-destructive as Pace 😂
I’m planning to write a longer post on the process of applying for and receiving tenure and am going to share all my tenure-track materials as an open-access toolkit as well, because we just don’t have enough public models… let alone for disabled scholars doing weird interdisciplinary work that’s often poorly understood by academia at-large.
Also on tap for the future: I have a number of posts that never made it onto this blog, because I never typed them up or never ported them over from old websites. I’m hoping to get all this backdated material posted by the end of the summer, and I hope folks in the field find it all useful when it’s all live!
Until then, back to channeling Carmilla regarding every administrator and academic bully at Pace, regardless of gender:
