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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with the GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development.

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JACK DEVINE, HOST: Welcome to another edition of Alumni Aloud. We’re here with Dr. Amanda Licastro. Thank you so much for joining us.

AMANDA LICASTRO, GUEST: Thank you for having me. 

DEVINE: So let’s start off with your research at the CUNY Graduate Center so what questions drove your research at the CUNY Graduate Center?

LICASTRO: I’m interested in the intersections of technology and writing which led me to pursue courses in book history and digital humanities. I arrived at the GC before the Digital Humanities Program officially launched which gave the chance to work with brilliant scholars like Matt Gold and David Greetham on the development of the DH curriculum and initiatives like GCDI which is the Graduate Center Digital Initiative, CUNY DHI, which is the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, and the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant. And it was this community and really these financial opportunities that facilitated my collaborative project: the Writing Studies Tree which is an online academic genealogy program and my dissertation which was a large scale data analysis of student writing. While applying to graduate schools I was specifically looking for a program that supported research in digital pedagogy and honestly it was the Instructional Technology Fellowship that sold me on the Graduate Center. It was one of the few places that prioritized teaching in the humanities and that instructional technology and pedagogy certificate and the Instructional Technology Fellowship help me pair critical theory with practical skills. So that prepared me both for teaching positions and alternative academic careers. 

DEVINE: So with the emphasis on teaching within your fellowship kind of pulled you into the Graduate Center where you were able to do research on student writing and how that relates to digital pedagogy in a fascinating way so when did you make, first make the decision to pursue a career at a university library? What steps did you take along your path to end up as an Emerging and Digital Literacy Instructional Designer at Penn Libraries?

LICASTRO: Knowing the realities of the academic job market in the humanities, I began preparing for alternative academic careers early. In fact, you can listen to an interview with me early in my graduate career on the connected academics’ website through the Modern Language Association. I attended panels on alt-ac options at the MLA. I met with mentors in these positions to ensure that I was building a robust resume of skills. However, even though my intention was clearly to look in the alt-ac track while finishing my dissertation I applied for a few traditional and hybrid positions, hybrid meaning that they were both teaching and administrative, as a practice round just to test my job market materials and to hopefully get experience interviewing. And at that I was offered a position of Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric in the English Department at Stevenson University which I happily accepted. So there I developed five course series in Digital Studies and I served as the faculty director of service learning. I also advised the digital literary magazine and these opportunities directly drew on the competencies I had cultivated at the GC, particularly working with the CUNY Academic Commons. So, you know, I actually started in very a traditional academic position, teaching a 4×4 load, advising students, you know and researching and publishing. 

However when the university experienced financial hardship I began exploring other options again. And this was in, you know, late fall 2019 early spring 2020 so the beginning of the pandemic when there were even fewer job opportunities available. And the job that I currently have at the Emerging and Digital Literacy Instructional Designer at Penn came to me from one of my trusted mentors at the Graduate Center, Kathy Davidson who had been sent it by a mutual acquaintance and because I had reached out to my dissertation committee to let them know that I was looking and of course to prepare them to write those all important letters of recommendation, she knew that I was searching and she thought it might be a good fit. When I was the Assistant Professor at Stevenson I led a two year grant study in integrating extended reality so that’s immersive technology like virtual and augmented reality into the curriculum. That two year grant project was hugely successful. It actually won me the Paul Fortier Award at the Digital Humanities Conference in 2017 and led to, you know, an entire research agenda around emerging technologies. So when this position presented itself I had a really clear vision for what I could bring to the position and I had a proven track record of how I could integrate these technologies into the curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania in pedagogically sound ways. 

DEVINE: So you started off in a traditional academic path at Stevenson and you were able to continue to pursue your research there in an award winning fashion. While you were there, were there any other career paths that you considered? 

LICASTRO: That’s a great question. And one answer is actually the role that I had as Faculty Director of Service Learning. So that was definitely an administrative position where I was helping to facilitate service learning across the curriculum. I was really helping faculty to think through community engaged teaching practices and pedagogies and I was working with non-profits to pair with our courses to make sure that those collaborations were really sustainable and mutually beneficial. That experience really made me think about project management and, you know, work in the non-profit sector with non-profit organizations and community institutions so I was thinking about how I could develop those project management skills and those administrative skills. I was very fortunate that my dean at the time, Sheryl Wilson at Stevenson, was very open to mentoring younger early career scholar academics to take on roles in administration. So I had been thinking about those things as well. 

DEVINE: So you began to hit on this during the answer to your first question, but what role did the Graduate Center have in your intellectual development and how did your experiences at the GC transform you into the Instructional Designer that you are today? 

LICASTRO: I really have to give so much credit to the Instructional Technology Fellowship for so many reasons. First and foremost, it was a collaborative fellowship. We had nineteen fellows from every discipline, you know, from chemistry to environmental psychology to art history. So I was working directly alongside, you know, scholars in every field who brought really unique perspectives to the role of technology in teaching. It was also a fellowship that, not only did we work directly with faculty in a service role so we were providing support for faculty, but we were also working directly with students, undergraduate students, to help them achieve their learning goals. So it gave you that teaching experience and that experience and comfort in the classroom. It allowed you to develop dynamic, innovative assignments and think about how to scaffold those assignments and asses those assignments and on top of that, at our monthly meetings we were always learning from each other so really peer to peer learning, new digital technology, digital literacy skills. So maybe it was learning how to make a child site on Word Press or maybe it was learning how to use GitHub or maybe it was learning to make interactive timelines using TimelineJS. There was always a focus on open access, open source philosophy of the underlining philosophy of all I really genuinely believe all of the CUNY Digital Humanities and Digital Initiatives of being open and sharing. And that I bring into everything I do, right, I always wanna work in collaborative team environment where diverse perspectives are making all of our approaches and products better. 

DEVINE: So in this team environment where you were, you know, sharing your skills and developing literary tools together you kind of you worked to, you know, establish yourself in expanding digital pedagogy in a fascinating way. But what were some of the challenges you encountered as you transitioned from graduate school to your career in academia? 

LICASTRO: You know it’s funny because I actually found it easier to be a new faculty member than I did being a graduate student. As a graduate student I was often working like three jobs. I was an Instructional Technology Fellow, I was an adjunct at NYU Gallatin, I was working for the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative. I was writing my dissertation. I was traversing the city, you know, through multiple forms of public transportation. Everyday was really, you know, I left my house at 7:30am and I came back at 10pm. It was really exhausting. And, you know, I always felt pulled in a million directions. And although I value every minute of that learning experience and I would certainly be a perpetual student as many of us would love to be. Being a faculty member actually allowed me to focus my energy and think about only one job and one, you know, trajectory at a time and it really simplified my life in a lot of ways. It allowed me to cultivate a really clear research agenda and think about how I wanted to accomplish that. 

The challenge was certainly leaving a cohort that I had built in my years at the Graduate Center of likeminded people who are working on the same problems. So, you know, here I credit really the other Provost Digital Innovation Grant winners: Nicky Kaufman, Ben Miller, Gregory Donavan. We used to meet, you know, every week to help troubleshoot each other’s code and, you know, think through the sticking points of our research and work through any the problems we were encountering with the more technical side of our dissertation work. And when I came to a very small school, like Stevenson University, I was really the only one working in not only digital humanities but really digital pedagogy period. So I had to figure out how to cultivate that same community and keep those conversations going outside of my university. And I must tell you I really did turn to social media and social networks for that and it help me think through how to network on a global scale using communication technologies when I didn’t have the built-in cohort of people who are working on the same thing, types of research as I was. 

DEVINE: So while there were a lot of benefits of transitioning from graduate school to a faculty position, you had a lot more time, and I can definitely relate to juggling a lot of different things at once while you’re working towards completing your dissertation and trying to pay the bills and get the experiences you need to become faculty or work some other sort of position after you graduate. There were some challenges. That you didn’t have the same team that you worked with before and that team was key to your research and the questions that were driving it, what you want to do, the sort of impacts that you wanted to have. So I guess, what would you recommend to current graduate students interested in pursuing a career working at a university library? 

LICASTRO: This is a great question and really the answer is that you can never really anticipate what will be next in the industry. You have to figure out what you’re passionate about and you have to figure out what drives your research in ways that you’re going to be able to put your energies and efforts into it without burning out. And hope, right, that the field and the industry is going to follow you. If you try to change your research trajectory to fit the market you’re always going to be losing, right. You’re always going to be behind cause you can’t predict the future, the trends that it’ll take. What I do know about working in university libraries is they are incredibly collaborative. 

So you do wanna think about not just being the solo scholar, you know working alone, you know writing, you wanna think about what team projects that you can be a part of and how to work with individuals that are servicing that field. So if you’re doing archival research, work with the archivist, the curators, the conservators, get to know them, ask them questions about their processes, you know, ask them questions about their career trajectory. Think about the, your natural inclinations, what you do find most fascinating and think not just about the scholars that are doing that work but the entire network of people who are supporting that work. Maybe it is the people who are in the grants office or the career office, maybe it’s the folks who are doing digital scholarship supports or the technical support, and really, you know, partner with them and think about it as a symbiotic and equal relationship instead just servicing your research or your scholarship. 

I would, I can’t recommend highly enough getting to know the librarians at the Graduate Center or wherever you may be doing your graduate work. I am so indebted to Paulie Thisolwade and Morris Maul and all the incredible librarians at the Graduate Center who worked with me not only in pursuing my really relentless decision to make my dissertation open access and include data visualizations in it by uploading it to the institutional repository but also by permanently making sure it never was on a database that was pay to play or a walled garden. 

And I also worked with alternative academics in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. So that is a journal that is based at the CUNY Graduate Center and it is an incredibly diverse group that works together to manage and edit the journal. The journal is now in its 23rd, I think, issue and I’ve been a part of it since the very first day when I was graduate student and those experiences working alongside the alternative academics and academics of all different ranks in all different capacities really helped me think of us all as equals rather than the false hierarchies that exist in academia that we promote but really, you know, aren’t true. We all shared equal expertise and we all have an incredible amount of skill and knowledge to bring to the table. 

DEVINE: That’s some really great advice, I think. Working together and looking at each other as equals is definitely something that is an effective way of working in academia. And I just wanna give you a chance for a final word for our listeners. 

LICASTRO: I just wanna express my gratitude towards everyone at the Graduate Center for all the support that they gave me. I really couldn’t have been better positioned coming out of that program because of the focus on teaching, because of the focus on pedagogy, and the support in developing technical skills so I’m very grateful for those opportunities. And I also just, one other little thing, and that’s if at all possible think about getting involved in your professional organization. So I got involved with the Modern Language Association, the MLA, when I was a graduate student and then as an early career faculty member I joined the executive council and that really helped me think about the role of humanities and public humanities in a much larger scale. And it was incredibly invaluable to how I charted my career path and how I advise others when they come to me for advice about careers in the humanities. So if you have an opportunity to get involved in your professional organization, don’t hesitate. 

DEVINE: It definitely makes sense to take advantage of the opportunities you have while you’re here. I just wanna thank you so much for joining us on Alumni Aloud. 

LICASTRO: Thank you for having me. 

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