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Associate Professor of English balances Film, Pop Culture, American Literature, and More
One of the things associate professor Jared Gardner loves about teaching and writing in the Ohio State English Department is the ways in which the Department allows him to be a man of many hats. "[The Department's] size and diversity have allowed me the space and time to see how my disparate interests fit together," said Gardner. "The book I'm working on now is about the kinds of literature in film and popular culture that I love but it's also a love letter to the Department that lets me figure that out."
Gardner, who has worked and taught in the areas of film, pop culture, and early American literature at Ohio State for the last nine years, hasn’t always felt so comfortable in his various roles. "I’ve been working in a schizophrenic fashion on two different books. I was becoming a split personality. It wasn’t working out so well in regards to my mental health." His work on a book on early magazine culture "kept bumping up against my teaching, which was often taking me to do film and pop culture." Gardner found himself working on whichever book correlated with his work in the classroom, working on the magazine book when teaching American literature, and a book on the rise of film and comic strip when teaching pop culture.
"When I got my sabbatical I couldn’t decide which to finish—I wanted to finish them both. I started moving between them in the first quarter of sabbatical, and the magazine book moved up to 1880s, and the film and pop culture began to move backwards," said Gardner. "Suddenly I realized they came together. I could unite the two sides of my divided soul. It was a reminder of why it’s good to have a sabbatical because it gives you a chance to think through these things. I was grateful to the Department that let me jump back and forth between the two projects until they came together."
The resulting book-in-progress is called Serial Citizenship and is a history of American popular serial forms from eighteenth century to the start of World War II. The breadth of the project is something Gardner hadn’t anticipated until he saw how well his many selves were working together. Gardner sees the story of the book’s development as a good example of how interdisciplinary work fosters scholarship in both the English Department and the University at large. And as the push towards this new style of academic organization grows stronger, Gardner sees the English Department playing a vital role.
"In some ways, English is an interdisciplinary department by nature. We have literature studies, literacy, digital media studies, folklore, linguistics, theory, and so on. One of the things I love about teaching here is that the Department always seems to be reaching out [to other departments]. We all benefit from it. As the university becomes more interdisciplinary, English is going to be a leader in that because we have in some sense the most experience."
Gardner’s interdisciplinarity influenced his development of a Popular Culture Studies minor for the University, which began this year. The minor allows students to take classes in fourteen different areas around the university, including English, film, sociology, women studies, and Chinese. And he was part of the planning and implementation of a Film Studies major, which has been offered through the College of Arts and Sciences for three years, an experience which helped him when it came time to build the Popular Culture minor.
Jared Gardner earned his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Johns Hopkins University in 1995. He is the author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature 1787-1845. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, and is a past recipient of a NEH Summer Fellowship, a Mellon Fellowship, and, most recently, an Arts and Sciences Research Grant for Exemplary Service.
For more information on the Film Studies major and Popular Culture Studies minor, visit their websites: Popular Culture Studies and Film Studiesu.
