Osargue Otebele is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media. Her research mainly focuses on Nigerian art and film from 1960 to 2000. She is the Professor Norman Jacobson Memorial Fellow through the Townsend Center for Humanities dissertation fellowship. She is also a graduate-student writing instructor for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), as well as a former Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. We are excited to be able to discuss her research, as well as MMUF, and her experience as a dissertation fellow!
Firstly, I would love to hear you introduce yourself! As a graduate student, what are some of your main areas of focus in your research?
My name is Osarugue Otebele, and I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media. I am currently working on my dissertation, which is focused on Nigerian cinema and art post-1960s. I’m looking at the way that aesthetics may be employed as a way to disarticulate nation-formation, rather than producing the idea of the nation after independence. That’s one thing that I do research on, but my other areas of research are quite vast. I do work within migration studies and Black reception studies. I’ve done extensive research about Black K-Pop fans, and their responses to the industry, and also the industry itself. My research is broad in that aspect, but my primary focus now is on my dissertation.
Why were you drawn to film and media studies? Why would you recommend non-majors to take classes through the Department of Film and Media?
I’ve always been drawn to film and media since I was a kid. I think that’s because my family was always engaged in films and television. They were coming from the Global South, so we lived in Nigeria but we were watching films from India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. I was always curious to know more about those different industries. When I was in undergrad I was an English major because my institution didn’t have a Film program, but my institution hired a professor to teach film in the English department, and that’s when I got really interested in film, not only as a viewer but also a critical thinker. I wanted to learn more about how to analyze what I was watching, how to talk about in a more critical way, how to think about part of the process of film-making, not just as someone interested in making film, but really interested in how to read film.
I think for people who are non-majors who are interested in figuring out ways to talk about the art-forms they enjoy more critically —- this could be film, television, social media, literature — taking a class in the film department is a way to learn the language to be a lot more succinct and critical in your engagement with these various mediums that we engage with all the time, but that we don’t always sit and think about the ways that we are engaged. Having the language to describe what you’re looking at is helpful for any field.
How did you find the transition from studying English as an undergraduate to studying film and media in your graduate program?
I will say that it was a big transition: I’m looking at two different objects. In undergrad I was mostly focused on literary texts and now I’m primarily watching films, and none of my objects are novels or short stories. There was a shift in learning how to talk about film differently from how I talked about literature. I needed to figure out the modes of analysis for literature versus for film, and I think that was the major difference. I was lucky to have spent time in undergrad taking film classes. I went to a pretty interesting institution in that it was a women’s college but there were other colleges and universities around us. Because we were in the Atlanta University Center Consortium, I could take classes at other universities in Atlanta. I was able to take film classes at Spelman, but also at Morehouse, and through that I was able to be introduced to the early theories of film and give myself a good foundation for graduate school. When I got to grad school, I already knew how to engage with film. But being an English major really helped me be a good reader, not only of theory but also of fiction. I’m able to do close readings of films as I do when I’m reading a text, so I think the transition from that wasn’t as difficult.
Can you describe the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, as well as some of the opportunities you’ve gotten to participate in over the course of your time as a fellow?
The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship is a fellowship for students in their junior to senior years, so you get two years in the fellowship. You get to work on individual research projects of your choice. The fellowship is dedicated to bringing the works and ideas of students from underrepresented groups in society to academia. Academics spaces are often very dominated by people from a specific background — whether that be a race background, a class background, or a gender background — mostly white men from Ivy League institutions. The Mellon Mays Fellowship is a way to give those from underrepresented backgrounds a chance to also get in the doors of academia and begin research as early as their undergraduate career. Through that program, you are financially assisted through the Mellon Mays Foundation, and during the semester you have a faculty mentor at your institution, who helps you write your projects, and you have a writing student mentor. You also get to participate in research conferences. For example, the Berkeley Mellon Mays students have their conference this Friday at Stanford. When I was an undergrad, unfortunately ours was on Zoom because it was during COVID.
The Mellon Mays program spans over 54 institutions in the US, and it’s very helpful in navigating not only your undergraduate career but also your graduate career after. You still get support: once you’re a Mellon fellow in undergrad, you’re a Mellon fellow for the rest of your life. You’ll still get support in your graduate education, there are writing and travel grants for your research that you can apply for. It’s really a way to help students who are often in a position where they feel they need that extra push, or they aren’t getting enough support from their institution, to lead them to the finish line of getting to graduate school, but also beyond that.
What kinds of things have you learned as a writing instructor for the Mellon Mays program? What are your main pieces of writing advice for undergraduate writers?
I really enjoy my time as a writing instructor. That’s when I get to work with the fellows quite closely, and I get to see their projects develop from a research question to their final thesis that they’re using to apply to graduate school. It’s always a very transformative experience, not only for the students, but also for me as their instructor to develop new ways to teach them. Our goal in the writing workshops is to help students transform their work from their initial research question to their final work. Here students learn how to write an abstract, how to develop a research question, how to write an introduction and a method statement, and how to conduct the kind of research they want to do. It’s getting students to understand the nuts and bolts of how to write an academic paper, to prepare them not only for the thesis, but also when they get to graduate school, where they’ll be writing lots of seminar papers in particular formats. What we also do in workshop is get students oriented around writing for the field that they’re in. We have students who are coming from English, Social Sciences, Ethnic Studies, and many different educational backgrounds. I help students navigate writing for their particular audience in English versus in an audience in Sociology, versus an audience in Ethnic Studies.
I would say for undergraduate writing advice, this might not be what you’ll want to hear, but you really do have to start writing early. When I was in undergrad, I used to give myself fake due dates for a week earlier than the paper was due so that I would have one week to revise my work, take time away from it, and go back to it with fresh eyes. I also would suggest reverse-outlining. Sometimes when I write a paper, I realize that what I said I was going to argue in the introduction is actually not what I argue in the body of the paper. I’ll go back through each paragraph and write in the margins what each paragraph is about. Then I’ll go back to the introduction and outline what I actually did, so that I can write an argument about that, and I can tell my reader the different sections of the paper they’re about to read. I think that’s really helpful in making sure that the paper is making the same argument that the analysis is helping support.
I know that you also are a fellow through the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Can you speak a bit more about the Townsend Center?
The Townsend Center dissertation fellowship gives graduate students a year of support in the dissertation writing process, typically near the end of your writing process once you’re at a place where you’ve completed your dissertation, or you can submit something you’ve worked on from that fellowship to a publication to get it published. It’s a year-long fellowship. It’s a mixture of graduate students but also professors and so you can incorporate the feedback into your work as you see fit. It’s a helpful process for getting other eyes on your paper, because writing a dissertation is quite an isolating experience. The fellowship gives you support and other people to help with the process.
What book would you recommend to everyone reading this interview?
The book is called Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista. It’s a memoir about the war on drugs in the Philippines. It’s a very difficult book to get through because she takes you through the ways that people become indoctrinated to commit violence and murder, so much so that we wish it on other citizens, because we think that some members of society are deserving of murder. It takes us through the killings happening in the Philippines during this time from the perspective of a journalist who was often the first person at the scene of these murders when a body was found. She goes to personal meetings with the families, but also takes us through the history of the Philippines that brought us to the moment wherein state-sanctioned murder is not only appreciated but also desired by people. I really would recommend it.