Her Story
About Evelyn
I have been active in my field since 1995, though my career has been marked by a significant interruption due to family responsibilities, including over 17 years of homeschooling my children. I started as a graduate student at the University of Iowa from 1995 to 1997, where I was already very active in my field, attending graduate student conferences and contributing to scholarly conversations. Despite never finishing my PhD due to structural disadvantages and the demands of care work, I am currently one of the most active members of my section. I publish three times as much as many of my colleagues with doctorates, attend national and international conferences regularly, and am widely cited by scholars around the world, particularly in the Global South and Global East. My scholarship brings an alternative perspective rooted in my East German upbringing, which allows me to offer cultural insights that resonate with scholars from non-Western backgrounds. I teach at the University of Oklahoma in both the Film Studies and Modern Language Departments, where I teach comics studies, graphic novels, literature, and language. I feel my most important contribution is not one singular achievement but rather the persistence of bringing my alternative perspective into different scholarly discourses over time. I am deeply committed to my students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and I see my role as giving them space to express themselves and negotiate their own perspectives rather than indoctrinating them.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Evelyn
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Really, don't get married, don't have children. I come from an entirely different society - East Germany - where things were very different. In East Germany, it was very easy to get a divorce, alimony would just be subtracted from the guy's salary, and care work was shared. Even the state propagated that. I had no idea what I would get into when I married in the U.S. I ended up really caring for my children and homeschooling them for over 17 years. I also ghost wrote a lot for my ex-husband who worked on Wall Street as both a lawyer and a finance person. I wrote sales pitches, did deal diagrams, wrote his most appreciated memos, and co-edited his book which was number one at Amazon on mergers and acquisitions. But you are doing it under a legal framework where you don't get any credit, and the guy is paying your lawyer's fees, so your lawyer is just selling you down the river. As long as a system like that persists, I would just tell women to boycott it, just don't do it.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think we play a really crucial role in this shifting political landscape. It's probably one of the most important professions to have right now. There's so much pressure on the humanities and a delegitimation happening after the end of the Cold War, where everything is subsumed under this neoliberalist thing where it has to turn an immediate profit, otherwise it's just garbage. But there is a reason people have thought, a reason people have written, and often against the arts and against censorship. I feel like we are at this moment right now where keeping our ability to enable people to tell their story, so that they can negotiate their needs and wants and visions for the future with one another, is very crucial. This is especially important when we have social media and mainstream media not functioning in democratic ways. I think it's very important to tell people to look at what their language is doing for them, where they might not have a say themselves. This transmission of knowledge is something steady that education can still render, and I feel like we are really, really important in holding this out and enabling students to think critically.
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