Papa, PhD

Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy

Edited by Mary Ruth Marotte, Paige Reynolds, and Ralph Savarese

Rutgers University Press

It is not easy raising a family and balancing work and personal commitments in academia, regardless of gender. Parents endure the stress of making tenure with the demands of life with children. While women's careers are derailed more often than men's as a result of such competing pressures, fathers, too, experience conflicting feelings about work and home, making parenting ever more challenging.

In Papa, PhD, Mary Ruth Marotte, Paige Martin Reynolds, and Ralph James Savarese bring together a group contributors from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. They are white, black, South Asian, Asian, and Arab. They are gay and straight, married and divorced. They are tenured and untenured, at research-one universities and at community colleges. Some write at the beginning of their careers, others at the end. But, perhaps most important they do not look back-they look forward to new parental and professional synergies as they reflect on what it means to be a father in the academy.

The fathers writing in Papa, PhD seek to expand their children's horizons, giving them the gifts of better topic sentences and a cosmopolitan sensibility. They seriously consider the implications of gender theory and queer theory-even Marxist theory-and make relevant theoretical connections between their work and the less abstract, more pragmatic, world of fathering. What resonates is the astonishing range of forms that fatherhood can take as these dads challenge traditional norms by actively questioning the status quo.

An interesting and well-written collection of essays on fatherhood in the academy. The authors' candid revelations about their desires for family, for work, for themselves, and how these are realized, modified, or sacrificed highlights how men are also influenced by social norms, institutional constraints, and the interpersonal relationships of family life. Men and Masculinities

Mary Ruth Marotte is an assistant professor of English and the director of graduate studies in English at the University of Central Arkansas. She is the author of Captive Bodies: American Women Writers Redefine Pregnancy and Childbirth.

Paige Martin Reynolds is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas, where she specializes in teaching and writing about early modern drama.

Ralph James Savarese teaches American literature, disability studies, and creative writing at Grinnell College. He is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, which Newsweek called a "real-life love story and a passionate manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities," and the winner of the Herman Melville Society's Hennig Cohen Prize for an "Outstanding Contribution to Melville Scholarship."

Disney dad / Amitava Kumar
Gaining a daughter: a father's transgendered tale / Lennard J. Davis
Gifts from the sea / David G. Campbell
The luck of the irish / F.D. Reeve
Shifting the tectonic plates of academia / Jerald Walker
Hair-raising experiences / John W. Wells
A river runs through it: queer theory and fatherhood / Joseph Gelfer
On writing and rearing / David Blake
How to do things with words / Ira L. Strauber
On fecundity, fidelity, and expectation: reflections on philosophy and fatherhood / J. Aaron Simmons
Sheathing the sword / Gregory Orfalea
Weighed but found wanting: ten years of being measured and divided / Robert Mayer
Vespers, matins, and lauds: the life of a liberal arts college professor / Ralph James Savarese
How white was my prairie / Mark Montgomery
Meniscus / Robert Gray
Once was lost / John Bryant
Shared attention: hearing Cameron's voice / Mark Osteen
Accidental academic, deliberate dad / Kevin G. Barnhurst
Late fatherhood among the baptists / Andrew Hazucha
Being a dad, studying fathers: personal reflections / William Marsiglio
Single dad in academia: fatherhood and the redemption of scholarship / Eric H. du Plessis
Superheroes / Stanford W. Carpenter
Maybe it is just math: fatherhood and disease in academia / Jason Thompson
Dreaming of direction: reconciling fatherhood and ambition / Mike Augsperger
Making a home for family and scholarship / Ting Man Tsao
Change is here, but we need to talk about it: reflections on black fatherhood in the academy / Jeffrey B. Leak
Vocabularies and their subversion: a reminiscence / John Domini
Balancing diapers and a doctorate: the adventures of a single dad in grad school / Charles Bane
It's a chapter-book, huh: teaching, writing, and early fatherhood / Alex Vernon
Pitcher this: an academic dad's award-winning attempt to be in two places at once / Colin Irvine
Odd quirks / Christopher Gabbard
The precarious private life of professor father fiction chef and other possible poignancies / Gary McCullough

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