POSTPONED    –details to follow–

Speaker Dr. David M. Perry is a columnist for Pacific Standard Magazine and a freelance journalist, covering politics, history, education, and disability.

Dr. Perry will lead two interactive workshops–open to all Cornell graduate students and interested postdocs–whose purpose is also to equip them with the necessary skills for a career outside the professoriate.

1. Writing Workshop about public writing: In this lunchtime workshop, David M. Perry will lead attendees through the process of getting their voice into the public sphere. He will cover pragmatic topics: the art of the pitch, finding the right venue, managing social media profiles, getting paid, making it count for tenure and promotion, and protecting against trolls and harassment. He will also talk about strategies to simultaneously maintain academic authority and be accessible to the broader public.
   Through it all, participants will be working on pitches, reading essays that embody important traits, and developing ideas
2. Conversation about disability-inclusive teaching: As increasing numbers of undergraduate students seek reasonable accommodations for a variety of reasons, instructors need not only to understand their responsibilities for technical compliance, but also to think deeply about how to build inclusive pedagogy. The delivery of an accommodation letter should be the beginning of a conversation between professor and student, rather than the end of the matter. In this afternoon workshop, we’ll learn how to initiate and sustain this kind of conversation with our students, and why doing so has the potential to positively transform the classroom for everyone, including ourselves.

More about the speaker:

Over the last five years, Perry—once a mild-mannered medievalist—has become a columnist for Pacific Standard Magazine, with hundreds of published pieces at venues all over the world, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Along the way, he’s learned a lot about how to take academic expertise and share it with a much broader audience. David taught for over a decade at Dominican University, has publicly discussed his experiences as a student and professor with both dyslexia and multiple mental health diagnoses, and has written extensively on disability in higher education and society writ large.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE SPEAKER

David M. Perry is a columnist for Pacific Standard Magazine and a freelance journalist, covering politics, history, education, and disability rights.
Over the last few years, Perry’s work has appeared in: CNN.com, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, Vice.com, Rolling Stone, the Chronicle of Higher Education,  Salon, Chicago Tribune, Pacific Standard Magazine, Newsweek, Playboy, USA Today, The Marshall Project, NBC News, Al Jazeera America, Eater, The Establishment, Rewire.com, Yahoo! Parenting, Crux, The Mary Sue, and many others.
Perry was a professor of Medieval History at Dominican University from 2006-2017. His scholarly work focuses on Venice, the Crusades, and the Mediterranean World. He’s the author of Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015). He also works as a Senior Academic Advisor at the University of Minnesota.

Sponsors

Department of History, Department of Romance Studies (in particular the TA Development Committee) and Careers Beyond Academia in the Graduate School as part of the faculty funding mini-grant program in collaboration with the Graduate School Office of Inclusion and Student Engagement.

About HAW!

Historians Are Writers!, believes that “academic” need not be a synonym for “dry.” We ask— and wrestle with—questions about the craft of writing, the effectiveness of particular strategies and techniques, the places/spaces we occupy in the history we write, and our experiences as readers. We read widely, across categories such as history, memoir, fiction, creative nonfiction, and graphic novels; we workshop our own writing; and we often host visiting scholars interested in discussing their own works-in-progress. We encourage students to be creative and experiment with their writing.

About Careers Beyond Academia

We help Ph.D.s and postdocs from all disciplines make the most informed decisions possible about their career paths after Cornell. Our mission is to give Ph.D. students and postdocs the chance to test drive specific aspects of various careers through flexible, experiential, empowering opportunities. See our website and LibGuide.