Academics

Tristan Reynolds ’19 in conversation with Dr. Bethany Packard about her focus on the early modern period of English literature. Listen on Soundcloud Transcript SPEAKER: Welcome to another Campus Conversation– Discussions with Transylvania University Faculty, highlighting their interest, passions, and pursuits. Here is Tristan Reynolds. TRISTAN REYNOLDS: I’m here with Dr. Bethany Packard who is an English professor here at Transy, focusing on the early modern period of English language literature. What is that, exactly? BETHANY PACKARD: The early modern period and what people consider it to be can vary depending on your discipline. As I’ve, for example, if I were in French literature or history, I might extend the time period a little later. So in English literature, the early modern has come to be the standard term that’s used often for 16th and 17th century literature. It’s sort of become the replacement for the Renaissance. So before I entered graduate school, in the past, the more common term– and a term that’s still used quite a lot interchangeably with early modern– is Renaissance when you’re talking about the English Renaissance. Of course, the people who work on Italian and even some northern European folks might differ with that. But over time, that term has shifted. But if I were working in, like I said, something like French literature, I might extend that into the 18th century or I might extend it a little bit earlier. So it’s kind

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Griffin Cobb chats with Bingham Diversity Scholar, Dr. Avery Tompkins about his research on gender and how it relates to issues at TU. Listen on Soundcloud Transcript [MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Welcome to another Campus Conversation, discussions with Transylvania University faculty, highlighting their interests, passions, and pursuits. Here is Griffin Cobb. GRIFFIN COBB: I’m here with Dr. Avery Tompkins, who is the Bingham Diversity Scholar and an assistant professor of sociology here at Transylvania. And we’re going to talk about the role of gender at Transy as well as his research into gender in general. So the first thing I want to ask is, how do we define gender, and how should we? AVERY TOMPKINS: OK, so I think that this is a question that’s difficult to answer. So people in general would probably say that gender is social– there’s a social aspect to that– and that it encompasses things like how people see their own sense of self and then also how others perceive them. So people may choose their gender or feel that they are a gender that might be man, or woman, or trans, or genderqueer, or some other gender that probably people would loosely put under transgender, even if people do not necessarily use that word to describe themselves. But in general, gender’s just how people feel about themselves and then also how people perceive them. Usually, gender– like for cisgender people, non-transgender people– it’s like

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