In third grade, Sister Kathleen gave me a year’s worth of reading to do over the summer to move me into 4th grade honors. (I did it, quite happily, in retrospect).

In high school, my English teacher encouraged me to find my voice and use it; that has been more of a process.

After confessing how much I enjoyed sitting in front of a microfilm reader while working on my thesis, my college major advisor encouraged me to pursue a Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania, where I could learn from phenomenal faculty whose intellectual interests dovetailed with my own budding questions.

In graduate school, I worked with inspiring faculty who pushed me to lean into some of my seemingly unconventional academic interests and to forge a degree program that fit me rather than the other way around.

Some of these transformative conversations were intentional, planned meetings; other interactions were coincidental, happenstance meetings. Together, these experiences have shaped the teacher-scholar-administrator I am today.

I have always embraced the term but haven’t always felt that a system predicated on disciplines is best equipped to facilitate work across them. In short, I’ve learned over my academic career that if there is something you want or need that doesn’t exist, you can build it. Interdisciplinarity is, at its core, a vision of what we could creatively be. My experiences have affirmed that we just need to create the spaces to foster this creativity.

There are few other places in the United States where questions of memory, history, and public reckoning were so prominent than in the former capital of the Confederacy. Richmond has afforded me the opportunity to do what I know and do best – develop courses that engage students in issues that necessitate community connection, collaborate with colleagues to support engaged teaching and scholarship, and sustain partnerships that respect and amplify different forms of expertise.