The Division of Arts and Humanities has launched a program called Advancing Faculty Diversity (AFD) to strengthen and support departmental efforts in recruiting and retaining scholars working in underrepresented fields of study. Individual, one-on-one mentorship of these new faculty is a critical component of the success of the AFD project. We request your assistance in nominating mid-career and senior faculty who you think would serve well as faculty mentors for the AFDAH program.
The AFDAH program will support up to five faculty mentors with one course relief and the opportunity to learn and refine mentorship strategies. In addition to holding an initial meeting with mentors to discuss best practices, we will meet occasionally as a mentor pool over the course of the grant period to share common resources, discuss challenges, and co-create a mentorship toolkit, which will serve as a primary resource for mentorship in A&H going forward.
One of the mentors’ primary tasks will be to help guide their fellows in implementing their plan to spend their research and professional development funds, which are provided by AFDAH. Additionally, faculty mentors will provide individual, one-on-one mentoring and will assist new faculty in the following ways:
- Career Milestones: Provide guidance and support to new faculty as they prepare for career milestones, such as the promotion process, manuscript preparation, and departmental service.
- Networking: The creation of career networks with introductions to appropriate journals, conferences, university presses, curators, museum directors, arts/theatre leadership, and critics.
- Academic Climate: The navigation of climate issues at all scales, which may include, (a) how to navigate a department with few or no faculty from underrepresented backgrounds or in which women, trans, or nonbinary faculty are underrepresented; (b) how to navigate the intelligibility question: how to navigate hierarchies of scholarly importance (i.e., Europe vs. the rest; feminist, Latinx, or Black-centered methods and theories; non-traditional or popular archives); (c) how to stress the importance of work from an emerging field.
- Collaboration: Where to find opportunities for intellectual or artistic collaboration beyond one’s department and the resources available on campus, which include interdisciplinary research groups and programs, as well as national and international professional organizations.
- Teaching: How to create a comprehensive curriculum in emerging fields; how to talk about student interest in emerging fields with colleagues; how to draw upon teaching resources and opportunities for collaboration, including the Course Threads program and Pathways.
Please submit your nominations and self-nominations through this form. We will accept nominations on a rolling basis, and mentors will be contacted not long after we receive their nominations. We anticipate holding three meetings with our mentor pool in spring semester.
Thank you for your consideration. If you have any questions, please contact maria faini (mfaini@berkeley.edu).