Mentoring Program
The primary purpose of the ASLE Mentoring Program is to offer graduate students and early career scholars career guidance and other forms of professional support. Some examples include guidance in academic scholarship or creative writing, service as outside readers on dissertation committees, help navigating the job market, advice for publishing, and support for faculty members in early career tenure-track and precarious positions.
Over the years, the mentoring program has evolved to support the ASLE community in various ways:
- We match graduate students and junior scholars with experienced mentors best suited to help them succeed in graduate school, early career positions (both tenure-track and precarious), and/or careers outside of the academy.
- We sponsor individual meetings at the biennial ASLE conference to provide new members of ASLE the opportunity to meet experienced members of the organization.
- We co-sponsor sessions at the biennial conference designed for graduate students and junior scholars seeking more information about the profession of English, ecocriticism and environmental humanities, and teaching and scholarship. We also sponsor and organize sessions on the job market, surviving and thriving in early career tenure-track and precarious academic positions, and careers outside of the academy.
- We facilitate collaboration within and across languages, disciplines and literary traditions. Whether you are an ASLE member interested in identifying others working in your area(s) of intellectual interest, or a student or scholar in any ASLE branch seeking contact information for scholars working in other areas of the field, let us know how me might be able to help.
If you are an ASLE member and would like to work with a mentor, please fill out an application:
If you are interested in becoming a mentor, please fill out our intake form:
If you have questions about the Mentoring Program, please contact Megan Kaminski (kaminski@ku.edu).
Video Workshop Resources
In 2022, ASLE held three online professionalization workshops for our student and early career members on the topics of Public Humanities (May), Job Market and Postdoctoral Applications (July), and Academic Alternative/Adjacent Careers (October). View the workshop recordings here.
In 2021, two Public Engagement Workshops on the topics of Civic Engagement (with George Handley) and Letters to the Editor (with Anthony Lioi) were held online. View the episodes here.
Mentoring-Related Articles
2019-2020 ASLE Graduate Student Liaison Mika Kennedy summarizes Juilliard Professor Anthony Lioi’s excellent advice to graduate students: “So You Want to Publish an Academic Article: 5 Essential Things to Keep in Mind“
Several short articles and updates have been published in ASLE News to make visible the mentoring relationships that develop as a result of the interactions between mentor and mentee. Click to read the compiled texts of these articles.