Spring 2001
Photo by Diana Watters
GWENDOLYN POUGH
Education
Ph.D. 2000, English, Miami U
Professional background
2000 assistant professor, U of M, Department of women's studies
Selected honors & awards
Diversity Teaching Fellowship, Western Washington U
Scholar for the Dream Award, Conference on College Composition and Communication
Margaret Walker Creative Writing Award
Original play, "I am Every Sister," selected for performance at the Garden State Art Center
Selected articles and presentations
"Writing Black and Defining That: Thoughts on Naming, Writing, and the Teaching of Writing"
"'Somebody Prayed for Me': Ancestral Presence and Diasporic Connections in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction"
"Hip-Hop Soul Mates?: Hip-Hop Soul Divas and Rap Music"
"Empowering Rhetoric: Black Students Writing Black Panthers"
Brush with fame
Photographed with Oprah Winfrey
Kudos
"Gwen makes me feel that I am part of something more solid, something that is changing the face and the heart of the University."
With her Ph.D. still hot off the press, new women's studies assistant professor Gwendolyn Pough is already a national expert on hip-hop soul divas. A prolific scholar of the literature of the African diaspora, she also is a gifted and award-winning writer. And she is transforming the curriculum, bringing new texts and new voices to the College of Liberal Arts' (CLA) classrooms.
Reflecting on her Paterson, New Jersey childhood, Pough says she knew early on that she wanted to go to college and be a writer. Intellectually precocious, she was urged on by her mother, who simply took it for granted that her daughter would excel. Her writerly ambitions went public in the fifth grade, when she wrote "a black version of Grease" and cast her friends and classmates to perform it. Years later, as a graduate student, she wrote a play that won the Margaret Walker Creative Writing Award from the College Language Association.
A true extrovert, Pough has centered her scholarship in the social and public sphere, focusing on the role of music and language--both literary and vernacular--in shaping race and gender consciousness and defining culture. She says writing her dissertation, Rhetorical Disruptions: Black Public Cultures and the Public Sphere, was a "lonely enterprise." But like her later work--some 30 or so articles and public presentations--it is inspired and animated by the music, rhythms, voices, and cultural ferment of the public spaces she chronicles, critiques, and so comfortably inhabits.
As a scholar, Pough is always on the lookout for the "ancestral presence" in the modern literature and culture of people whose lives were uprooted by colonization. A diehard reader, she seeks out works vitally connected to her scholarship and teaching. In Sandra Jackson-Opoku's novel The River Where Blood is Born, for example, the portrayal of the transatlantic slave trade "deeply engages issues of displacement and forced removal" that are at the heart of Pough's scholarship.
A new kind of energy
Pough's highly interactive and improvisational teaching style reflects her genuinely egalitarian spirit. She believes unequivocally in creating a "student-centered classroom. Power and knowledge come from everyone, so I like to go with the flow of the class--see how it moves in the room."
Beyond the classroom, Pough's generous nature and lively intelligence already have made their mark with colleagues. Jigna Desai describes Pough as "a delightful, supportive, and intellectually energizing colleague." Eden Torres, noting how alienating a large institution can be, credits Pough for helping her "feel that I am a part of something more solid--something that is changing the face and the heart of the University."
A new vision
That "something" is a provocative new vision that is finding its way into the curriculum and changing the way students see the world. Pough is broadening the reach of academic study to include popular literature, music, and the language of the streets. She is looking, for example, at how black women are commodified in commercial culture, particularly in popular literature. And a course she is developing on mystery novels looks at "how race and gender complicate the way 'crimes' are investigated and solved."
Pough's overarching concern as a teacher and scholar is to "bring more understanding about race to the general public." As she brings students into the swirl of language, music, and ideas in her classrooms, she hopes they will become as invested as she is in creating the cultural understanding that is at the core of her work.