English professor one 4 McCausland Fellows
Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a four-part series.
English professor Catherine Keyser has been named as one of the first four members of the McCausland Faculty Fellows Program.
The fellowship was established this year after alumnus Peter McCausland and his wife, Bonnie, donated $10 million to the College of Arts and Sciences to support research and creative teaching. Nearly half of the donation goes to the fellowship program, which plans to grow to 20 members and targets young faculty. Only professors who have earned a doctorate in the last 10 years are eligible.
Each fellowship recipient receives a $10,000 stipend.
“I feel enormously grateful to have been chosen for the fellowship, especially because I think there are a ton of deserving people in the College of Arts and Sciences,” Keyser said.
Keyser said her love of teaching and bringing her research questions into the classroom embodies what the McCausland Fellowship is designed to honor.
“The two halves of what the fellowship recognizes, research and teaching, are actually intimately connected,” Keyser said.
She said she was able to incorporate her research on 1920s female writers in one of the classes she taught, which allowed her to see the connections her students made and make her own new discoveries about the material.
“One of the things the fellowship is designed to do is to allow USC to keep faculty that they think are achieving highly, because this is a point in their careers where lots of scholars move from institution to institution,” Keyser said. As a result, she said, this fellowship allows the College of Arts and Sciences to show professors that they are appreciated and should continue their work at USC.
“It really supports me in my research and teaching,” she said. “While it will certainly, in the course of that research and teaching, go towards archival trips or conferences to present work, it’s really designed to be a support to people who are in mid-career.”
Keyser’s past research has included topics like gender roles, magazine culture and how women writers in the 1920s faced changing limitations.
“I’m really interested in how female celebrities, particularly writers, navigate their own cultural prominence,” Keyser said.
She is currently working on a book project on modern American literature and food technologies. She said she became interested in this topic because she believes that this is a historical moment where people are frightened about their alienation from their food.
“Basically, I like to focus my scholarly life on obsessing about things that give me pleasure,” she said.
The McCausland Fellowship promotes teaching in innovative and creative ways. Keyser said she tries to make her classes fun and help her students understand literature through connections to culture and history.
“I’m able to bring them to the library and show them Hemingway’s letters, Fitzgerald’s flask,” Keyser said. “I show them bartending guides from Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. I show them magazines that depict big cities during the Modern Period. And all of those objects come out of the same period that this weird literature does.”
Keyser has her students write comparative essays on the cultural and historical aspects of the literature from a particular period of time.
“I think that it’s really important to try out activities like that, that break the boundaries of the classroom, so you don’t imagine the classroom as just a place where an expert stands at the top and just tells you what you should believe,” she said. “The more you can, sort of figuratively, get your hands dirty, as a student and as a teacher, the better the learning process.”