Amy CarlsonSitting on the elevated stage and glancing up from my presentation script, I look out at the audience of folklorists and fairy-tale scholars. So many faces before me, whose names I frequently found at the top of journal articles and on the title pages of scholarly monographs. I read their words, their ideas, and now, I’m speaking to them. The chance to present at a conference like Thinking with Stories in Times of Conflict as a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa not only testifies to my growth and maturity as a scholar, but to the nurturing and mentoring environment in the English department that cultivated that growth. I learned to gaze at my disparate, wide-ranging research through key critical lenses and build on the commonalities rather than the obvious differences. As a Librarian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Library, my studies and my profession mix and strengthen my approach to both. I’m at that moment in my post-graduate life just like when I take a breath before speaking on the stage, in front of so many scholars, and mentors, and friends. Thanks to the faculty and to my fellow students from the Department of English, I have a lot to say.
Janet Graham
2019 PhD Graduate
Leora Kava2019 PhD Graduate
In August 2019, I began a year-long Fulbright grant in Tonga, where I continue to host workshops, design curriculum, and edit publications for the Pacific Verse project. This project is a collaboration with Tongan artists in Nukuʻalofa where we run poetry workshops for community, using a mixture of Tongan and English for creative expression. In August of 2020, I’ll be returning to California to join the communities, students, faculty, and staff of San Francisco State University as an Assistant Professor of Critical Pacific Studies.
I am deeply grateful for my cohort members, professors, mentors, and dear friends within the English Department with whom I got to write, study, and learn from standpoints of indigenous sovereignty and liberation. As a Pacific Islander writer and teacher, I was given space to grow and observe how to teach in ways that would allow my students the freedom to imagine and write toward more just futures. With deep gratitude, I bring the critical, poetic, political, and personal skills I learned in the English department to my communities in San Francisco.
Michael PakI am an Assistant Professor of English in the Humanities Division at UH West ʻOahu. I teach rhetoric and composition courses and currently serve as the Writing Program Coordinator. My work has been published in Composition Studies, Composition Forum, and Amerasia Journal.
Veronica Freeman
2018 MA Graduate
I am currently a content editor for HigherEducation, a company that has an extensive portfolio of online college websites, based out of Seattle, Washington. My work involves editing and approving articles for publication. I also have the opportunity to do creative projects at my company, one of these projects has been writing content for a new publication and interviewing professionals at universities across the country.
The UH English department honed my editing and writing skills but also taught me the skills I use every day, such as presentation and communication skills. Through the English program, I learned to offer constructive feedback and also prioritize my time and workload.
Matt Ito
I currently serve as a Project Coordinator for GEAR UP in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. GEAR UP focuses on providing college and career readiness resources for students and their families. Prior to working with GEAR UP, I served as an ENG 100 lecturer at UH Mānoa. My approach to teaching ENG 100 is themed around public discourse and grounded in place-based and critical pedagogy.
My graduate studies at UH Mānoa introduced me to a range of theoretical and literary texts from Hawaiʻi, the Pacific, and beyond. I am grateful to so many in the department who allowed me the freedom to wrestle with difficult questions about identity, settler colonialism, and kuleana while pursuing my academic interests. Too, my time as an ENG100 Mentor and Writing Center consultant fostered my love for teaching and provided opportunities to hone my pedagogy and develop major assignments for ENG 100 that I draw from to this day.
Rachel Reeves
I am a freelance journalist and writer currently based between the U.S. and the Cook Islands. My work ranges from writing speeches and press releases for a state senator in Honolulu to writing copy promoting the Cook Islands’ marine park to publishing a magazine about indigenous values and resources in the Cook Islands with funding from UNESCO. I regularly write for various non-profit organizations, government departments, and businesses, and pitch stories to magazines and newspapers when I have time. My second book, an adaptation of my Master’s thesis, is being published this month.
My graduate studies with the UH English department broadened my perspective, provided me with invaluable mentorship, introduced me to people who share my passion for writing about the environment and marginalized people, deepened my confidence, and helped me to hone my time management skills.
Samantha Ikehara
2017 MA Graduate
I am currently a PhD student in American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. The department I’m currently in is interdisciplinary and I like getting to work with professors and students who think in different ways than I do, such as historians, geographers, anthropologists, public health practitioners, among others. Reading across and against disciplines in seminars has shown me how the cultural and political complexities of life under U.S. empire require an intersectional approach and how no one discipline has all the answers to the many questions that we face today.
My education at UHM gave me both the professionalization skills and the theoretical foundation I rely on everyday to survive in a PhD program. Above all else, the professors I worked with at UHM taught me what it means to take seriously my intellectual and political commitments both in the seminar space, and more significantly, outside of it too. The invaluable education and mentoring I received at UHM continues to inform all of my intellectual endeavors and I can’t imagine where I would be without it.
Rajiv Mohabir
2017 PhD Graduate
I am currently and Assistant Professor of creative writing, specializing in poetry in the Master of Fine Arts program at Emerson College in Boston. My most recent book is Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, a translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s firsthand account of Indian indenture in Guyana (1916). I love being able to mentor students in shaping their poems and their critical reading skills as they relate to craft. With this I am given time and space to work on my own writing projects as part of my professional skill set.
The English Program at UHM provided me with opportunities to deepen my own poetic craft, university teaching skills, and critical thinking in and around the themes that occupy my poetry and essays. I call this “studio plus” time when students ask me about the PhD in English with a creative dissertation. Through taking classes in cultural studies and creative writing and mentoring from professors who taught them, I learned how to push deeper into themes and concerns that appeared in my work. I also learned how to harmonize with a community of like minded colleagues who share these concerns but express them through differing methods.
‘Iolani Antonio
2016 MA Graduate
I currently teach English courses at the University of Hawaiʻi Maui College. I love that my position as a lecturer allows me to inspire intellectual, social, and political growth in my students by encouraging them to awaken to their responsibilities as active participants in the cultural, national, and global communities they inhabit. I also appreciate the opportunity to guide my students in their growth as writers, scholars, and academics and to help prepare them for future academic and professional endeavors.
The opportunities afforded to me through the English graduate program at UH Mānoa have prepared me immensely for my current position. In my work as a graduate student, a Writing Center consultant, and an English 100 mentor, I deepened and honed my critical thinking, reading, and writing skills and was able to gain hands-on experience with students in the classroom. My time in the program allowed me to work closely with professors who modeled how to cultivate positive instructor-student relationships, how to structure syllabi and classes, and how to craft stimulating and challenging activities, discussions, and assignments.
Brittany Manley
Chase Wiggins
2016 MA Graduate
I currently teach 7th and 9th grade English at ‘Iolani School. It was always my hope to return to my alma mater and join the English department. The impact this program had on my personal and professional growth toward that goal is hard to overstate. One of the things I appreciate about my current position is the flexibility I am afforded to teach my grade-level content in ways that feel authentic to me and allow me to draw on my personal passions as an instructor and academic in my own right. It’s always a fun challenge finding ways to deliver high level sophisticated literary theory and make it resonate with 7th graders.
My combined work in literary studies, comp/rhet, and cultural studies has also equipped me with the ability to speak confidently about interdisciplinary and cross-cultural connections beyond what many still consider to be the traditional canon of English content, while still very much preparing me for the rigors of daily secondary classroom instruction. Although we are seeing K-12 teachers pursue content-based graduate study more often, the majority of current teachers still hold advanced degrees related to education and teaching. The MA program in English has provided me with an invaluable depth of content knowledge for my colleagues to draw from, just as I can rely on many of them for things like instructional and classroom management strategies.
Aidan Pang
2015 MA Graduate
I’m a PhD candidate in the English and Cinema Studies departments at the University of Oregon, where I’m working on my dissertation, titled “Hear Me Out: Remediating Bodies through Digital Voices,” which examines how East Asian women’s voices in aural media queer white heteropatriarchal ideals of subject and nationhood. A part of my first chapter is forthcoming in Mechademia’s “Queer(ing)” issue in Fall 2020 and I have another publication slated for Spring 2021 in Performance Matters. My research interests in queer theory, gender & sexuality, and disability studies also merges with my teaching in the Cinema Studies department, where I am currently teaching a course on representational politics through television aesthetics.
Marie Alohalani Brown
2014 PhD Graduate
I am an associate professor in the department of religion at UH Mānoa, a specialist in Hawaiian and other Polynesian religions, and I teach our undergraduate course on theories and methods or the study of religion. I am also the undergraduate advisor.
My graduate studies with the English Department introduced me to a wide range of theories for the study of literature and culture, which in turn, inform my own approach to teaching religion.
Ranjan Adiga
2013 PhD Graduate
I’m currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Westminster College, Salt Lake City, Utah. I like my relationship with my students and that this job gives me the time and resources to work on my writing.
The transferrable skills that I gained from UH-M’s English program were critical thinking and writing. At the heart of human growth lies the ability to self-reflect and question assumptions, and the intellectually rigorous, dialogue-based learning at Manoa’s English program instilled those values in me, and in my writing, giving me the confidence and the tools to face the larger world.
Phil Drake
2013 PhD Graduate
I am currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas. As of summer 2019, I hold a joint appointment in English and Environmental Studies, and I am moving into the Director of Graduate Studies position for the English Department.
The English Department at UH nurtured my curiosity through its interdisciplinary course offerings, stimulating culture, and diverse faculty. Most significantly, the Department fostered in me sensitivities towards difference in its various forms, which still proves valuable in both my teaching and research.
Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo
2013 PhD Graduate
I am an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i—West O‘ahu, where I teach courses on children’s and adolescent literature, fairy tales, British literature, and feminist and queer theory. There are many things I really like about this position; first and foremost among them are the interactions I have with students, whose insights and contributions I learn from each semester. I am also very happy that my position at UH West O‘ahu affords me the opportunity to continue working on my scholarship and to integrate my research into the classroom. My articles have appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Pacific Coast Philology, and The Middle Ground Journal. I am also the co-editor of a volume on Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2017), and I have contributed chapters to the collections Misfit Children (Lexington, 2016) and Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy (Springer, 2019).
The breadth of graduate course content at UH Mānoa has prepared me very well for teaching my own courses on a variety of topics within literary and cultural studies. Furthermore, the guidance I received on designing and implementing syllabi has been invaluable for participating in curriculum development at UH West O‘ahu, where I have created several new English courses by drawing on the knowledge and experience I gained as a graduate student.
Chad Pickering
2013 MA Graduate
I am the director of the Writing Room and the Gen Ed Tutoring Center at Colorado State University-Pueblo. I absolutely love running my own writing center and thoroughly enjoy educating, training, and working with a team of writing tutors who are tasked with supporting their fellow student writers, regardless of level, discipline, or genre. It is an honor and a joy to see my staff carry out, through their tutoring practices, what I have been able to teach them.
My time in the English graduate program at UH-Manoa—especially my coursework in my formal concentration and my stint in the Writing Center—quite sufficiently prepared me to assume the post I now hold at CSU-Pueblo. On a regular basis, I am able to teach my staff about composition pedagogy; rhetorical theory; grammatical analysis; and even postmodern conceptions of language, power, ideology, and the constitution of knowledge. These are the matters I studied in graduate school, and I now apply them almost daily—in addition to all the administrative work involved. I also appreciate the great deal of scholarly and creative fulfillment my position allows me.
Michael Puleloa
2011 PhD Graduate
As a faculty member at Kamehameha Schools, Kapālama, I teach world literature, design curriculum for honors, dual credit, and fiction writing classes, advise editors of a nationally-recognized literary journal, and write for local, national, and international publication. I’m able to do all these things because of the many great mentors, peers, and classroom experiences I had as a student in the graduate English program at UH Mānoa.
Jennifer Orme
2010 PhD Graduate
My current job title is Fabulist. I work for The Mysterious Package Company where I do many secret and mysterious things, but mostly narrative design, writing, and editing. MPC is a mail-order entertainment company which produces multi-sensory narratives that employ various artifacts and media to tell strange tales. The position allows me to devise narratives that play within the genres I have always most enjoyed and studied: speculative fictions.
This position is a creative one that uses many of the skills I developed in Literary Studies at UHM. Research skills have been invaluable since my first day and I use them constantly when developing stories or adding layers to bring the weight of history to our very fictional tales. The expertise I developed in narrative theory is also integral to narrative design. I use my theoretical background in discussions with my colleagues about story development, but it also informs my creative process.
Nicole Sawa
2010 MA Graduate
I am currently a sales representative at W. W. Norton & Company, and one of the best parts of my job occurs when teachers are excited to use Norton books with their students—books that I myself studied as a student.
I worked in the editorial department at Norton for four years, which may seem like a more natural progression from a master’s degree in English! However, in my current position I still rely on certain skills I learned in the graduate program: understanding higher-level texts, learning to articulate my positions, and having discussions and finding common ground with people of different backgrounds. I know many prospective or current graduate students are planning to become educators, but book publishing is absolutely a viable, wonderful career alternative.
Jolivette Mecenas
2009 PhD Graduate
Where did the decade go? Ten years ago, I received my PhD in English from UH-Manoa, so I welcome this opportunity to update the department. In 2017, I received tenure from the University of La Verne, where I began my career as an assistant professor and writing program director. During my recent sabbatical, I was visiting professor and Interim Director of First-Year Writing at California State University, Los Angeles, where I was awarded a grant to study first-year writing courses at Cal State LA. My research focuses on assessment, curriculum, and faculty development in writing program administration, and a cultural rhetorics approach to teaching writing. You can read a recent blog post I wrote about teaching multimedia profiles of immigrants and refugees, and listen to interviews conducted by my students on the public media website KQED. My time in the English Department at UH fostered my research on the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality with writing programs as locations of educational access and critical pedagogy.
As a graduate student, I learned the importance of participating in professional organizations, and the need to advocate for students and other academics of color in the field, which I continue to practice. I serve as an early stage proposal reviewer for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the College Composition and Communication conferences, and for the NCTE journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College. I’m also a member of the Asian/Asian-American Caucus of CCC/NCTE, where I catch up with fellow UH-Manoa English Department alumni and graduate students in rhetoric and composition/writing studies – there’s a good group of us from UH!
Recently, I accepted a new position as Associate Professor and writing program coordinator in the English Department of California Lutheran University. Cal Lu is located just north of Los Angeles, my hometown, where I live with my family – my partner Dr. Charlyne Sarmiento, who teaches writing at CalTech, and our son, Max, who is currently into karate, Pokemon, baseball, Harry Potter, and just being a kid. I’m looking forward to this next adventure
Calvin McMillin
2006 MA Graduate
My time as a graduate student in the English department prepared me well for my future endeavors as a scholar, writer, and teacher. My scholarly interest in Asian American detective fiction began with my MA project, which later formed the basis for my doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The graduate courses at UH-Manoa also sparked my interest in bringing to light hidden narratives that complicate, contradict, or unsettle accepted knowledge. This approach to scholarship led to my own discovery of a formerly lost novel by author Frank Chin, which was later published as The Confessions of A Number One Son by the University of Hawai‘i Press. My passion for creative writing was also nurtured at UH-Manoa. My first story was published in Hawai‘i Review, and my final portfolio for a graduate course evolved into my first short story collection, The Sushi Bar at the Edge of Forever. In respect to teaching, I firmly believe that the English department’s breadth of coursework in literature, cultural studies, composition, and creative writing have made me a more well-rounded educator. In addition, my stint as a tutor at the Writing Center helped me develop the requisite skills for working one-on-one with students to improve their academic and creative work.
After teaching at the University of Michigan-Dearborn for several years, I was happy to return to Honolulu last year as an English teacher at ‘Iolani School where I can encourage an even younger generation of students to become more knowledgeable, self-reflective, and critically engaged. As I learned at UH-Manoa, the discipline of English provides an indispensable service in an increasingly uncertain world, as it bestows an array of essential tools for success—in whatever career or life path my students may choose.