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 offer mentoring opportunities for members across all phases of an academic life through the Staying Alive Project, a blog and conversation dedicated to sustaining an emotionally, ethically, and spiritually healthy life in academia—no matter what happens
• 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 and send in this application.

If you are interested in becoming a mentor, or if you have questions about the Mentoring Program, please contact the Co-Coordinators of the ASLE Mentoring Program, Erin James (ejames@uidaho.edu) and Elizabeth Dodd (edodd@ksu.edu).

Mentoring Program Articles Archive

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.