Adjunct Lit & Life: Christine Smallwood & Maggie Doherty, June 17, 2021

Join Shelter & Solidarity for a discussion with special guests, novelist Christine Smallwood (author of The Life of The Mind) and scholar Maggie Doherty (author of The Equivalents and the recent Nation article on “Adjunct Hell”) as we explore the relationship between art, experience and activism in a contemporary higher education system increasingly characterized by contingency, inequality, and uncertainty. Contingent faculty organizer Nicola Walters and Joe Berry will join as respondents.

Christine Smallwood is a critic and journalist and the author of a novel, The Life of the Mind, published in March 2021 by Hogarth Books. A contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, her fiction has been published in n+1, Vice, and The Paris Review. Co-founder of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, she is also a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.

Maggie Doherty is author of the recent article in The Nation on “The Rise of Adjunct Literature, and of the acclaimed book The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship and Liberation in the 1960s. She teaches writing at Harvard, where she earned her PhD in English. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Nation, among other publications. She lives in Cambridge.

Nicola Walters is an organizer, researcher, public speaker, and teacher. She is a lecturer in the Department of Politics at Humboldt State University and organizes faculty labor as the Statewide Membership and Organizing Chair for the California Faculty Association (CFA).