Jacques Review

JACQUES REVIEW would like to welcome Dr. Sophia Basaldua-Sun (The Metropolitanist) to the Scholar Edition of Spotlight. Spotlight is a series featuring in-depth conversations with interviewees of various backgrounds and occupations. It provides a look into the planning and unique personal career journeys of each individual. It even offers small glimpses into their private lives. The finished product hopes to convey that every story matters, is worth hearing, and has a great deal of significance to the mosaic called humanity.

Sophia and I have been digital pen pals for a little over three years now. I ran into her Instagram page in 2019 and found it to be a quick and ready reference to comparative literature. I shared my discovery with my followers in a post. In fact, I created the #sophiabasalduasun on Instagram. Since then, we’ve gone on to have a variety of discussions ranging from fountain pens, her love of notebooks, and the mess that can be academia.

One of the considerations that I make for the Scholar Edition of Spotlight is tapping into scholars who are on the digital street (so to speak), making themselves available, and engaging with those who would of never had a chance to have such interactions. After all, that’s the space where I became aware of them. These public scholars have found unique ways to make their field and interests accessible to anyone with a screen.

Naturally, this edition of the Spotlight interview series came as a result of interacting for such a long time with Sophia on subjects that I have no background (whatsoever) in. You can say she inspired the need to have a space where I hold conversations with brighter minds than I for the purpose of sharing their insights to a different audience.

Sophia has a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Armstrong State University, an M.A. in the same concentration from Clemson University, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stony Brook University. Her work focuses on decolonial studies, metropolitan studies, and late-nineteenth- to early twentieth-century prose literature.

Sophia, thank you for taking the time to participate in this important conversation. While I primarily know you as an authentic New Yorker, I was surprised to learn that you weren’t born here. Where were you born? How long did you live there?

I was born in Newport Beach, California, but I barely lived there a year. Then my parents moved to Virginia, and after that Savannah Georgia, where I basically lived until I left for graduate school.

How many siblings do you have? How was life growing up?

I don’t have any siblings. I suppose it was a little bit lonely a lot of the time. It can be a lot of pressure because you’re your parents’ only kid, you’re the only grandchild, the only niece. That has benefits, but it also means a lot of people telling you how they think you should live your life, the older you get. I do think being an only child contributed to me being very independent and imaginative. It made me a reader and a writer. I had a lot of time to myself when I was young, to just sit in my room and write and read. Working on all of these self-manufactured projects was great training for doing a Ph.D. I had no problem sequestering and driving my dissertation.

What is your favorite childhood memory?

When I was a child I really loved playing in the woods and the salt flats. Those hours of running around and pretending with my friends and neighborhood kids are probably my favorite memories. When you’re a child the marsh grass is as tall as you are, and spikey. But if you push through it, on the other side you find what adults can already see, a sort of meadow of sand surrounded by marsh grass, and nothing but blue sky up above. When I think about childhood, it’s the nature of the barrier islands–like the salt flats–that are my happiest memories.

Who would you say played a significant role in who you are today?

That is such a challenging question. So many people shaped who I am today. I really have my high school photography teacher, Theron Humphrey, to thank for the visuals of The Metropolitanist. He found the latent photographer in me and convinced me I had any visual perspective at all. He’s also how I learned about Instagram. I don’t know that I would have chosen such a visual platform without his influence, even though it was maybe a decade before I actually did that.

But the person who really changed the trajectory of my life was a professor at Oxford of Emory: Adriane Ivey. She was the chair of English and taught the women’s literature course while I was at Oxford. I thought it would be Austen, Bronte, Woolf, but her specialty was Black women authors. I’m not proud of it, but I want to tell the full story because to me it’s illustrative. You can’t grow up anywhere in the U.S. and not find you’ve absorbed racism, especially in the south. I wanted to drop the class because I didn’t think Black women’s writing would be interesting.

Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Virginia Woolf are considered to be canonical women writers in English literature.

Well, it turns out I could. All my life I’ve known I wasn’t white enough for Savannah. My dad is Mexican-American and my mom is white. Being Mexican isn’t a race, it’s an ethnicity. But in Savannah, it might as well be a race, and I felt that every day. The way people took in my appearance and immediately needed to box me into my non-white identity. I was used to being defined by my non-whiteness.

So, when I read Passing by Nella Larsen, it was like coming up for air, and I couldn’t get enough. That was when I decided I was going to be a literature scholar. I wanted to give the next generation what professor Ivey gave me: the start of a vocabulary for the oppression I felt sucking the oxygen out of my world.

Of course, since then I’ve had other amazing mentors who held the space open for me to do this work. Dr. Wheeler at Armstrong and Doctor Carpenter at Oxford (the advisor who told me to stay in Dr. Ivey’s class) both supported my graduate applications and always encouraged and believed in me. I’ve learned since then how rare that is, actually. That support and mentorship profoundly impacted my life. Aga Skrodzka (who advised my thesis), Dr. Manganelli who sat on my thesis Committee, Dr. Rhondda Thomas, who immediately saw me at Clemson and made me feel like a real scholar. It’s not unusual for females, POC, or any scholar who doesn’t fit the ‘traditional’ model to not receive the support they need. There’s a lot of ugly gatekeeping in academia, so to immediately find an ally was no small thing.

I was lucky enough to find that again at Stony Brook with my dissertation advisor E.K. Tan, who has been a generous advisor and safe harbor for so many junior scholars. Joseph Pierce, who made me believe I could study Spanish and connected me to a lost piece of my own heritage. I was raised by an assimilationist, so I was very unmoored from my heritage. I still am, in a lot of ways, but he gave me the gift of space to be imperfect at Spanish.

I don’t think it’s an accident that so many of the folks who held space for me to study and become were themselves immigrants, scholars of color, or both. They made an inhospitable world more hospitable and supported my work and growth.

You’re probably wondering about the Oxford reference. Sophia received an associate’s degree in liberal arts from Oxford College of Emory University.

You earned a Ph.D. from Stonybrook University. What did you love about your experience there?

I loved the people I worked with, my colleagues, but not the institution itself. My fellow graduate students and professors like E.K. Tan and Joseph Pierce made my time at Stony Brook. Beth Tsai (whose amazing book is coming out soon), Divya Menon, Ruby Liang were all immediate friends and amazing colleagues in the Cultural Analysis and Theory program. I grew up with Ryn Silverstein, Andy Eicher, Kim Coates, and Emily Gilchrist, most of whom continue to be good friends and colleagues.

Beth Tsai is scheduled to release Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals via Edinburgh University Press in April 2023. To learn more, visit Dr. Tsai’s website.

Stony Brook’s proximity to New York and its unrivaled research institutions. The SBU library is terrible for a humanist, but there are plenty of great libraries in New York. Basically, research access and the people, but neither of these things have to do with the university itself which was under terrible leadership (none of those leaders are even still there…but they got golden parachutes). Stony Brook launched a full-scale attack on the humanities during my time at that institution and they never had a great research collection of their own though they have some amazing professors, again because of their proximity to New York. But, they lost a lot of noteworthy and even famous professors during that period because they refused to do the bare minimum in supporting them.

Why did you choose to do the doctorate in comparative literature? Were you already committed to the idea since doing the master’s in English literature?

Comparative literature… I’m ashamed to say I didn’t realize that was what I was signing up for. In my M.A., I was in an English program, but like many graduate students, I was really taken with theory and wanted to make a theoretical contribution. My thesis advisor and mentor Aga Skrodzka was a comparative literature scholar of Polish film, but I didn’t know what that meant. She was a graduate of the Stony Brook program and suggested it would make a good backup program. At that time it was the program of Cultural Analysis and Theory with two tracks: comp lit and cultural studies.

I picked comparative literature because it was literature. Then they accepted me really quickly and offered me a research fellowship–which is a big deal and an honor, actually. E.K. called me around that time, so I felt really supported and like this was a program where I would receive a lot of mentorship. The funny thing is, no one can define comp lit so in a way, I’m still not very articulate about the field. It is so broad–any language, genre, theoretical lens. It’s sort of what you do if you don’t want any boundaries to what you might do with your work.

Well, if you’re going to put it that way … comp lit sounds like a great area. I would love that type of freedom. Clearly, you had another area you would have preferred over this.

My comfort zone was English literature and I probably would have hidden there if I had really comprehended that I was going to work in three languages, but I’m so glad I didn’t. My world expanded exponentially through the shift so I’m glad I didn’t get the chance to let my imposter syndrome rule the day. In hindsight, Clemson had a lot of comp lit scholars, but no one really talked about it or how it was different. It just kind of existed as a fact that didn’t require in-depth exploration. That’s very English literature. But in a Ph.D. it’s about defining your field and situating yourself in it, so it makes a lot of sense that these fields weren’t yet strongly differentiated in my mind.

You mentioned that it is notoriously hard to define comparative literature. If you didn’t have any other choice but to provide a simple definition, what would you say?

Is there a simple way to describe comparative literature? Comparatists would tell you no. Basically, it’s the study of literature (or imaginative literature) across languages and cultures. Because the object is broad (any literature) it is also the place where a lot of theoretical work is done, because so much of the work is in you as a scholar defining what you’re going to cover. From a qualifications perspective, usually, you’ll need to work on three languages, but how that gets determined varies by department/program.

Were there days during your doctoral journey that you felt like quitting? If so, what helped you get through those periods?

I thought more about quitting before going to do my Ph.D. the M.A. is a good temperature check. “Okay, after two years do I still want to do this but intensify the commitment and narrow the career track? Yes? Well, buckle up.” I didn’t think about quitting once I was there. I broke down what I needed to accomplish and took it day by day. At that time I needed the job.

Of course, some days were awful. Some weeks it felt like I had no idea what I was doing, that I would never find the right words or structure. I still worry that my work is unrigorous, that I have no expertise. But I was a writer from childhood, so that practice kept me moving. Basically, I can’t stop writing. If I have access to a pen, a keyboard. I keep it fun with stationery. Curiosity also drove me; the need to understand. Most days I have no idea what drives me to action, but paradoxically for someone who hates physical activity, mentally I cannot be still.

From previous conversations with you, I’m aware that Stony Brook’s comparative literature department has been shut down. What are the implications of shutting down such a department? Does it say anything about how this area of concentration is viewed?

Yes, absolutely. Stony Brook’s shutting down their comparative literature program, citing budget problems when financially they were fine according to an external audit, was–for me and my cohort at least–the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the avalanche of job market and departmental shutdowns during COVID. And I want to be clear that the Stony Brook faculty senate advised the administration against shutting down comparative literature, European languages and literature, and Hispanic languages and literature (they tried to shut down this last one too but pivoted their argument that the other two needed to close in order to divert resources to Spanish when they started facing public backlash to their attempt to shut that department down).

The faculty Senate went all the way to the chancellor of education in New York State. They commissioned an external audit. Basically, the educational experts said ‘you need the humanities,” but the operational leadership didn’t see the value in the humanities in a STEM-obsessed world. They wanted to chase the obvious, immediate gains of catering to a STEM-hungry audience without thinking about the long-term consequences of those short-term gains.

Their choice is very much in keeping with the devaluation of the humanities in higher education across the United States. Departments and full-time employment in these fields are disappearing, which is dreadful for us as a society. Because, what kind of local or global community do you build when you don’t value disciplines that teach cultural knowledge and competency? Language! Seriously? Foreign language education isn’t useful or a priority in a global economy?! The study of English language and letters, which is basically written verbal communication? We don’t need effective oral or written communication in the workplace? Advanced literacy has utility in every sector, but our society right now doesn’t value it because they don’t think there is monetary value in creative fields, which is surprising because creative sectors like publishing and video streaming thrived during the pandemic.

If you had to give three study tips, what would they be?

Study tip 1: know your objective. What are you trying to accomplish? Knowing your goals will help you shape your study plan.

Study tip 2: Create habits. A little bit of time daily or at regular intervals will always get you to your goal effectively.

Study tip 3: Experiment until you find a method that really works for you, and then keep trying to improve your approach.

Doctoral students typically function as graduate instructors and teaching assistants. How was that experience?

Teaching was one of my most rewarding experiences, though I never got to the place where I felt I was great at it. But I do think I improved a lot by the end and there are few things as rewarding as having a student drop by to tell you a text you assigned impacted them positively/gave them something they have been searching for. A lot of teaching comes down to that: organizing works by great thinkers and being present to answer questions and provide guidance and context so your students can engage deeply and hopefully develop their own perspective.

Is there anything that can be done by universities to better the experience of teaching assistants?

Support them. Pay them a living wage, of course, but care about their well-being. Teachers-professors or otherwise–shouldn’t have been forced back to in-person teaching. But even pre-COVID universities didn’t offer teachers enough support. It’s the same for students, actually. A lot of times, they just expect everyone in the classroom to magically run the show as if life isn’t messy. And they expect you to do it basically for free, for the prestige, to prove that you aren’t motivated by profit. Sure, most of us aren’t; see the fact that we chose the career path we chose, but basic survival in exchange for labor shouldn’t be the terms.

Sometimes, universities try to trick people into volunteer positions now! Literally, they’ll advertise unpaid postdocs. Just move across the country and work for free, for the job experience. Universities are charging unprecedented tuition fees, but they don’t have enough money to pay their educators at all?

Your research is based on literature set in New York, Buenos Aires, and Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Why those three cities?

This is probably my most asked question. Obviously, there’s a practical answer: my language competencies played a big role in determining my cities. But there are a lot of fascinating cities that are being studied.

My languages were English, Spanish, and French. When I started the project I wanted to turn the postcolonial critical gaze (though I would switch to a decolonial critical gaze later) on the centers themselves. For English, the obvious two were London and New York. New York checked more boxes for me than London, despite London being the economic capital of the nineteenth century thanks to imperialism. I already knew Paris had to be a part of my project. It won the epistemic battle for primacy. Paris is the nineteenth-century metropolis was remember. New York is the urban center most commonly associated with hegemonic power in the 20th century. I wanted to capture the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth century because moments of transition really lay bare the structural mechanisms of power.

I had a professor on my committee who kept trying to push me toward Barcelona instead of Paris (maybe that was his way of saying he wanted off the committee…he wouldn’t have had a role there really without the French element of the project). I get the idea. Barcelona is a fascinating city and it is also emblematic of a particular style of urban modernity, but sorry, whether it’s real or rhetorical, Haussmannization is the center/starting point for most urban studies people. It is unavoidable, and its influence is a fundamental part of telling this story. Paris has to be confronted head-on to pull off the critique I was trying to pull off. I would love to study Barcelona. It’s one of my favorite cities to visit, but it didn’t make sense within the scope of the project.

For the Haussmannization reference, see Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Haussmann was a French administrator in the 1800s who was chiefly responsible for the recreation of Paris. Most of the changes are still visible today. — Britannica (cf. The Guardian).

Buenos Aires was, to my mind, the most important turn in the project. Of course, there’s the obvious influence of having studied with Joseph Pierce, who works on Argentina. But, in Latin America, the most obvious options are Buenos Aires and Mexico City. They are very different cities, but they are also the two cities that, to this day, form the Latin American part of the Spanish-speaking global network. I knew I wanted a Latin American and not a Spanish city, and it was important to me to choose a city with a colonial history that also isn’t hegemonic now. Latin America is especially interesting because, like the U.S., it’s already in its postcolonial phase during the period I was studying. If we take the 3 cities together we have the iconic 19th-century metropolis of Paris, the iconic 20th-century metropolis of New York, and then Buenos Aires, which people still identify as the “Paris of South America.” Buenos Aires parallels Paris and New York in ways that are fascinating and important.

For example, I’m reading a book about Cartier right now, and from the 30s through the Second World War, Cartier saw Buenos Aires as a place they should seriously consider opening a branch. They believed the center of the economic world would shift after World War II, to somewhere in the Americas. They already had their New York store, but they clearly saw Buenos Aires as a contender. It’s hard to imagine now because the global economy is so different today, but that’s a great material example of Buenos Aires’s and Argentina’s growing role in the world economy.

An important disclaimer here is that, in her assessment, Sophia finds the book to lean heavily on the side of imperialism and disagrees with a lot of what is in it. Francesca Cartier Brickell’s great-grandfather was the youngest Cartier brother.

Now, I have to ask this. When did you learn French?

I started during my M.A. program at Clemson with intro courses and have been studying off and on since then. For me, the thing that made the biggest impact has been scheduling lessons on italki. Working one-on-one with native speakers is a game changer.

You are currently an Executive Assistant and DEI Divisional Officer at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. How has that experience been?

Moving into publishing has been an absolute pleasure. KDPG is a prestigious and historical group of imprints. Knopf publishes a lot of canonical texts ranging from Thomas Mann to Julio Cortazar (which is part of Pantheon’s backlist). But it’s especially fun to go from studying literary history to participating in it.

What advice would you give to those with terminal degrees looking for employment outside academia?

Don’t self-select out. You never know what is going on behind the scenes at a company for a hire, but it rarely has anything to do with your quality as a candidate. Everyone I speak to says something similar. Basically, they decided they wanted to work in publishing, and while they might have worked a different job along the way to support themselves, they applied to everything that opened up in the big five until they got their foot in the door. I would broaden that, if you’re looking for your break, look for publishing-related work in any capacity, doesn’t need to be limited to the big five. There are a lot of fascinating independent presses out there. Bookstore experience is a big deal, there are marketing and publicity firms that work with publishers (including the big five) especially when it comes to specialized audience development questions.

Define it as broadly as you need to, but pick your industry/career path and apply for six or nine months. Of course, improve your materials as you go, when you see the opportunity, but a recruiter once told me there are on average 700 applicants to any given job (not to mention recruiters are hand selecting as many candidates that they’ve already vetted ahead of time to try to move the process along), don’t assume because you get five or six rejections that it has something to do with you.

The other two bits of advice I would give: (1) tell everyone you know that you’re seeking to make a career transition into (pick your industry). Nearly everyone I told knew someone in publishing and offered to broker informational interviews for me. None of these led directly to a job, but they did create connections and allow me to develop my knowledge of the industry far more deeply than I could have in isolation.

The second bit of advice: (2) apply to jobs within 48 hours of their going up. At PRH things moved incredibly quickly for jobs, and you want to be one of the resumes and cover letters in that initial push because those are the applicants that do end up getting plucked out of obscurity in my experience.

Your first post on Instagram was on April 18, 2018. I’m familiar with it enough to know that it isn’t the typical account that post images about your life. What is The Metropolitanist’s Instagram page about? How has creating the account impacted your life?

The goal of The Metropolitanist was basically educational, to make the types of courses I wanted to be teaching available in a digestible daily format. My hope was to make comparative literature better known. Maybe, after a lifetime of seeing and hearing the humanities devalued, I wanted to prove to myself that people were as intellectually curious as I thought they were. I also wanted to participate in creating the discourse on a new platform and for a different audience. I felt like this project would make me a more effective communicator and teacher. To do this I would need to convince an audience to spend their free time with me.

It has given me a lot. A new community. I’ve gotten to know scholars all over the world: like Dr. Elaina Gautier Mamaril, Dr. Valerie Smitherman, Dr. Judith Fredericke Popp. But I’ve also met an array of creatives who inspired me to develop my aesthetic. Erick Gama on a friendly level, but in terms of inspiration, Skybambi and letras.literarias.mx are journalers I aspire to be like aesthetically. The aesthetics I look abroad for inspiration, but the message here is my message.

Like you, I’m a pen and notebook enthusiast. What is so great about using a fountain pen? What is your favorite Pen? Should everyone own a fountain pen?

I like the tactility of fountain pens and inks, as well as paper and notebooks. There’s an immediacy to it. It’s so material, kind of the opposite of ideas and writing. I think those two things complement each other. Notebooks and fountain pens make material the mental work of knowledge production (which is abstract) in a way that computers don’t for me. Of course, you know, I love a Sailor pen.

I don’t like to be prescriptive. Fountain pens aren’t for everyone. They take time, and maintenance and they are messy and slow, but I need that slow pace or I’ll jitter right out of my head.

You’ve also become a regular artist of sorts. I’ve watched as you develop your notebook decor skills to an impressive degree. What made you decide to do that?

The gram. Watching other people be creative. also, the drive to create visuals for work that isn’t inherently visual. There’s a potential romanticism to the life of study. I’m still trying to find the visuals for that with a mix of old and new, but I’m getting closer. Now I’m starting to dabble in antique objects to get there.

You have a beautifully designed website called Maison Metropolitanist. Rarely do we find scholars with such visually stunning sites. You have described it as a “digital dwelling place.” It generally functions as a space for more exhaustive takes of your microblog. What can we expect in the future dans cette maison?

I’m still trying to figure that out. I love it, the idea of it that was actually born out of not being able to get the TheMetropolitanist.com domain name. I got creative, and the idea of Maison Metropolitanist catalyzed something in the imagined world I had already begun creating. I’m going to try to start writing for it more again, to do longer form writing, but I’m also still trying to figure out how to bring my salon to life. We’ll see.

For more, visit Maison Metropolitanist.

You’ve hosted six episodes of Salon Evocations with Kim Coates in 2020. I must say that despite the fact that I was unfamiliar with the material being discussed, the effort, depth, and richness of the conversation caused me to be very excited and wanting more. What did you enjoy about that?

That was a fun project! I liked taking part in intellectual conversations with a close colleague. It was too much work in the end, but I loved coming up with themes, researching those themes, and recording. It was a pleasure to be in conversation with Kim about all of the topics that set our minds alight with inspiration as graduate students.

Are there other podcasts that you’ve hosted or appeared in that we should be aware of?

Yes! I started Bookshelf Remix with Elaina Gautier Mamaril. It’s mostly her idea, but I had a lot of fun launching it with her, and I’ll still be popping up as a guest so keep an eye out for that. We’re good friends so we’re always swapping reads. I just didn’t have the mind for podcasting and I couldn’t be a full collaborator.

Otherwise, I like my features in @teawithantigone’s magazine, Antigone. I loved my feature in 19 Cents Q&A Interviews, curated by my colleague Matt Yost for the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. For me, that was an honor. Finally, I like my appearance on Gray Matters the Blog podcast. I really like that podcast and its ethos.

Antigone’s interview is actually a great companion to this one. I will say it is required reading. It features a high scholarly conversation.

Of All the places you’ve gone on vacation to, which one is your favorite? Why?

I’m not a favorites kind of person, but places that stunned me: Sintra Portugal. I want to go all over Portugal. San Sebastian in the Basque region. Barcelona, Casa Batlló brought me to tears with its beauty. The landscape of Argentine Patagonia wiped my brain of everything else. I want to see Scotland with my allergies under control and I like the Cote d’Azur. I want to go swimming, mostly, where can I do that?

Ha! Who’s conducting the interview here? I’m not much of a swimmer so I can’t help you with that. I hope a future interviewee dabbles with that question. What is your favorite dish?

There are too many good foods to pick just one, but I have a fondness for Japanese food, and especially sushi. The summer between my B.A. and M.A., I worked at a family-run sushi restaurant that I had been going to since I was about fifteen. Every evening they would feed the whole staff, after the restaurant closed. The idea was that regardless of what happened that day we would all come together and eat. It was like a family and I learned more about Japanese food than I would know otherwise. Certain foods especially, like Japanese curry or pork shogayaki are really nostalgic for me, but none are ever as good as the ones we ate those nights. Nothing commercial can live up to it. One chef, the sushi chef who had been there since I was 15, Ito, would customize my dinners when it was his night to cook. He would add a tuna roll because it was my favorite, or a garlic flower on my chirashi bowl for the same reason. That’s another thing that is never the same. No chirashi bowl ever lives up to the ones Ito made for us.

In a follow-up conversation, out of curiosity, I asked Sophia did she retain any of the Japanese she heard or secret recipes. She confesses to having forgotten the few phrases. Seeing that she was facing the front during work hours, she didn’t get to really see the magic of the cooking.

You’ve been dancing tango for about 14 years now. How did you get started and how has it impacted you?

I started tango when I was a first-year in college. I actually started with swing. In Atlanta, at Georgia Tech, there was a monthly swing event held in a ballroom with a different big band every month. My first college friend, Stella, had a car. She and I would go every month. There were hundreds of dancers. Then, one night, they announced a joint swing and tango event at Emory. I went, and once I heard milonga, that was it. I had this image of tango as being too macho, but the guy I danced the milonga with was very sweet. He spoke with a lisp, which really surprised me. It was completely the opposite of what I expected. I immediately had a huge crush.

When I went home that summer I found a place to take lessons and I never stopped. I liked it because it felt like there was always more to learn. It emptied my head and gave me a break. I made some close friends through it and, eight years in, it led me to my husband. When I think about it, a lot of what drives what I’m drawn to is community. The community of makuai (that end of shift dinner), of tango, of running The Metropolitanist. I can easily be a really solitary person, so when I find community it becomes that much more important to me.

What is something you enjoy doing that most people don’t know about you?

Who knows? It seems like I share everything. I love to swim, always have. I wish I had easy access to a pool. Being in the water makes me feel like a giddy child. I was a big swimmer as a kid.

What is the last book you read that you would recommend and why?

I read so many books, what even was the last one I read? I guess it was Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait. I couldn’t put it down so I guess for a historical fiction read that is a take on Robert Browning’s poem My Last Duchess, I would recommend it. I don’t read a lot of poetry, but I always enjoyed Browning. I like the idea of giving voice to the duchess. Read the poem first. The premise is a duke courting his next bride shows off the portrait of his “last duchess” to her and it’s strongly implied that he killed her. Browning’s poems are often used to teach the idea of an unreliable narrator.

Are there any projects and/or organizations that you are involved with that you would like the community to be made aware of?

Aside from the ones I’ve previously mentioned? Vital Thought. It’s another educational project started by a colleague. The idea is, humanities scholars pursuing or possessing a Ph.D. teach short two-day workshops on their research expertise. I love projects that are imagining new models of humanities education so I’m a fan of that one.

Sophia Basaldua-Sun, pleasure to have you.