Back in the Midwest

By: Michelle Anstett
Editor-in-chief

Temporary English faculty member Brooks Appelbaum is glad to be back in the Midwest. Upon moving into the small-town environment of Monmouth after several years spent living in larger cities in the South, she discovered it was an “eye-opening experience to be back in the Midwest and feel at home.”

Appelbaum, who received her Bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Cornell University, will only be teaching at Monmouth College for one year, but that does not dismay her. She is looking forward to the opportunity to assist while English faculty members Mark Willhardt and Rob Hale are on sabbatical in opposing semesters.

Knowing that she was considering her next career move, a friend of Appelbaum’s who teaches in the Quad Cities sent her an advertisement circulated by Monmouth. The friend also told her to look for positions around the Quad Cities area, as it is home to a large number of colleges and universities.

While the original advertisement was appealing, it was actually the English department website which intrigued her the most. “In the department description, they used words such as ‘love’ and ‘beauty’ in reference to literature,” Appelbaum said. “I thought we were all post-modernists now, and that no one used those words anymore.”

Her love of literature is focused in a time when words such as “love” and “beauty” were standard, so this view proved to be right up her alley.

Appelbaum’s main academic interests lie in Victorian literature, most specifically women’s literature, criticism and theory. In writing her dissertation, she wanted to find out what women were saying about the novel, as women were writing the majority of novels in the Victorian era.

Upon completing her dissertation, Appelbaum and her husband left Ithaca, N.Y., as it was just too cold. “I made a deal with Dennis: no jobs above the Mason-Dixon Line,” she said.

That deal led her to a position on the faculty at Auburn University in Auburn, Ala., where she taught for three years. She said Auburn was a switch for her, as it is a major research university, and her focus was on teaching. Appelbaum enjoyed the job, as it suited her interests, but living in Auburn was not to her liking.

After leaving Auburn, she and her husband moved to Charlotte, N.C. It was at this time when Appelbaum combined her loves of theater and teaching. While she had participated in theater at Auburn, she was not officially teaching it at that point. In Charlotte, Appelbaum taught theater at a high school, but soon discovered she “didn’t want theater to be part of my job.”

She then returned to Auburn, this time as a lecturer. To her, this was the most enjoyable time in her career, as she was able to teach but did not have the pressures of being a tenure-track faculty member to worry her. She then began to look for a change in her career, and found the position at Monmouth College.

Even though she is only here for one year, Appelbaum plans to get a lot accomplished in the short amount of time. This semester, she is teaching a class on the works of the Bronte sisters, as well as two sections of English 110.

She wants to “gather as much information about differing methods of writing as possible” and learn from her colleagues and students. She would like to get a feel for teaching at a small liberal arts college, as she is used to working at larger universities. Finally, she would like to “inspire somebody to either really care about writing or feel more confident… to get my students to assume ownership of their own writing, and to view writing as a tool that they have mastery of.”