Papa, PhD!!

November 23rd, 2010

We’re delighted to announce that Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy is now available from Rutgers University Press.

The anthology, edited by Mary Ruth Marrotte, Paige Martin Reynolds, and Ralph James Savarese, is a terrific and varied collection of essays by men at different stages of their fatherhood and academic careers. The book came about when Mary Ruth, a former colleague of Caroline’s at Stanford (the two were pregnant together), organized a Mama, PhD colloquium at her school and the participants wanted to discuss how the issues raised in the book were the same or differed for men. Two years later, the conversation unfolds in the pages of this book:

“[The contributors] 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.”

Here’s the Table of Contents:

Thinking Stiffs: An Introduction

Part One: Fathers in Theory, Fathers in Praxis: Merging Work and Parenting

Disney Dad by Amitava Kumar
Gaining a Daughter: A Father’s Transgendered Tale by Lennard J. Davis
Gifts from the Sea by David G. Campbell
The Luck of the Irish by F. D. Reeve
Shifting the Tectonic Plates of Academia by Jerald Walker
Hair-Raising Experiences by John W. Wells
A River Runs through It: Queer Theory and Fatherhood by Joseph Gelfer
On Writing and Rearing by David Haven Blake
Doing Things with Words by Ira L. Strauber
On Fecundity, Fidelity, and Expectation: Reflections on Philosophy and Fatherhood by J. Aaron Simmons
Sheathing the Sword by Gregory Orfalea

Part Two: Family Made: The Difference of Alternative or Delayed Fatherhood

Weighed but Found Wanting: Ten Years of Being Measured and Divided by Robert Mayer
Vespers, Matins, Lauds: The Life of a Liberal Arts College Professor by Ralph James Savarese
How White Was My Prairie by Mark Montgomery
Meniscus by Robert Gray
Once Was Lost by John Bryant
Shared Attention: Hearing Cameron’s Voice by Mark Osteen
Accidental Academic, Deliberate Dad by Kevin G. Barnhurst
Late Fatherhood among the Baptists by Andrew Hazucha
Being a Dad, Studying Fathers: Personal Reflections by William Marsiglio
Single Dad in Academia: Fatherhood and the Redemption of Scholarship by Eric H. du Plessis
Superheroes by Stanford W. Carpenter

Part Three: Forging New Fatherhoods: Ambitions Altered and Transformed

Maybe It Is Just Math: Fatherhood and Disease in Academia by Jason Thompson
Dreaming of Direction: Reconciling Fatherhood and Ambition by Mike Augspurger
Making a Home for Family and Scholarship by Ting Man Tsao
Change Is Here, but We Need to Talk about It: Reflections on Black Fatherhood in the Academy by Jeffrey B. Leak
Vocabularies and Their Subversion: A Reminiscence by John Domini
Balancing Diapers and a Doctorate: The Adventures of a Single Dad in Grad School by Charles Bane
It’s a Chapter-Book, Huh: Teaching, Writing, and Early Fatherhood by Alex Vernon
Pitcher This: An Academic Dad’s Award-Winning Attempt to Be in Two Places at Once by Colin Irvine
Odd Quirks by Chris Gabbard
The Precarious Private Life of Professor Father Fiction Chef and Other Possible Poignancies by Gary H. McCullough

Ask for it in your local bookstore or look for it online today!

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