Salon Evocations Sophia Basaldua-Sun & Kim Coates

In this episode, Kim Coates and Sophia Basaldua-Sun discuss their experiences in graduate school focusing on their time as doctoral students in Comparative Literature. They cover major milestones in the Ph.D. student journey such as Coursework, Comprehensive Exams, Dissertation Defense, and Conferences. They also cover the social, emotional, and psychological side of being a Ph.D. student focusing on the mental health crisis facing graduate students and ways to cope and thrive within this atmosphere. Finally, they turn to the future of humanities degrees and various ways to utilize a graduate degree in the humanities.



LINKS

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048733317300422

https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/03/graduate-students-need-more-mental-health-support-new-study-highlights

In this episode, Sophia Basaldua-Sun and Kim Coates discuss the literary canon. They cover what is a canon? A canon is a body of agreed upon important works that make up foundational knowledge in a particular field. They discuss how canons are always plural, for example, every discipline has their own canon; there is no one canon. They discuss the popular conception of the canon and what books we ought to be reading, how the canon is outdated, what has been added in the last century, and how forms of knowledge are curated.

This week in the Salon, Kim and Sophia discuss queer literature. They discuss the definition/indefinition of the term "queer" and how specific writers have used the concept of "queering." Kim and Sophia also review their experiences teaching queer fiction and queer theory in the classroom and how their own research projects are related to queer studies. Some authors discussed in this episode are Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, Hanif Kureishi, and Henry James.

READING REC:

The Preface and Introduction to "This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color" edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa.

In this episode of Salon Evocations, Sophia Basaldua-Sun and Kim Coates discuss literature related to New York City, focusing on female authorship and the 20th-century. They discuss a work they both read for this episode, Willa Cather’s short story “Behind the Singer Tower” - which is linked below - as well as other writers such as Sylvia Plath, Nella Larsen, and Edith Wharton who set their work in New York or who were shaped as authors by the city. Sophia and Kim also discuss their experience with the New York City literary scene and what stands out to them as making the city a thriving place to be a writer and reader. 

LINK

“Behind the Singer Tower” https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss045

This week on Salon Evocations Kim Coates and Sophia Basaldua-Sun talk all things writing, academically and creatively. Kim speaks from her experience as an academic and the editor of her literary journal Evocations Review while Sophia discusses her experience as an academic as well as as the sole content creator for The Metropolitanist on Instagram and her website Maison Metropolitanist. They talk personal writing histories, advice from the experts, and their own processes, tips, tricks, and hacks for getting themselves started.

In episode 1 of Salon Evocations Sophia Basaldua-Sun and Kim Coates discuss the idea of the salon as a cultural party that removes education from the confines of the institution. We explore the who, what, where, and why of salons as well as our own engagement with the concept over the years before turning to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace as an example of how salons appear in literature.