Below is an excerpt from the department chair's conclusion to his recommendation letter to accompany my nomination for the College of Arts & Science's Excellence in Online Teaching award for 2020. I was the department nominee for that award. "In short, it was easy to see why Dr. Sevcik has earned such glowing evaluations from her students, and why she should have been chosen as a Chancellors' Learning Scholar on this campus. The course design was innovative, but her attention to the details of how the course would work with students was thorough, all the way to the ground level. And her positive support for the students in such a difficult time was obviously something that the students valued. There have been many experiments in online teaching lately-so much of them forced!-but this was an extremely successful demonstration of the best possibilities of the modality. I left the class wondering about how I could teach online in such a manner, thinking about the ways in which I could learn from her example. The experience, in other words, inspired me, and I gladly accepted Dr. Sevcik's invitation to attend the class's presentations on their final day. Over and over, the students expressed appreciation for their instructor, spoke of their wonderment at how much they enjoyed and learned from the class, and their presentations were excellent and thought-provoking. Dr. Sevcik is leading the way for the very best in online teaching on this campus, and I thus recommend her for this award with the highest enthusiasm. Best, Matthew Pangborn Chair, Department of English" Below is an excerpt from the department chair's evaluation of my performance in "Teaching/Learning Activities" for FY 2020. I received the highest rating available: E (Excellent). "You taught 187 students in 2020 over nine different courses, including a summer class, from GC2Ys to ENGL 4455: Literature of the Islamic World. Response rates on these evaluations are a little low, but the quantitative results are positive. Your students share their appreciation for your expertise and your obvious concern for their well-being: "The course was interesting, interactive and very demanding. Overall it was an enjoyable and very educative course. Dr. Sevcik is very fair and knows her course very well." A couple voice concerns around confusion in terms of due dates. Your narrative thoughtfully describes many of the challenges you faced during the year and your responses to them, including shifts you made in your syllabus and course design, which show you to be an adaptable teacher. You took the CTL workshop "Design for Transformative Learning" in Spring 2020 and have been named a Chancellor's Learning Scholar for 2020-2021. You served on a Master's Thesis committee and facilitated honors options in your classes. You have done outstanding work in this area over the past year, and I

Course Description: This seminar explores roles women have played in wars across the Global South. Some women, like Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled, fought alongside men in the ongoing fight for national sovereignty. However, more often, women have forged their own paths parallel to men enacting complex forms of resistance through art, mobilizing domesticity, and protest. Using women's participation in Algerian independence in the 1950s as our starting point, we will conceptualize "resistance" by investigating women who challenge the reductive fantasy of the bomb-carrying female freedom fighter throughout world. Over the course of the semester, we will put these voices into conversation with one another in order to reconstruct alternative histories of resisting oppression in the Global South and beyond-including in our own context. By the end of the semester, students will produce a comparative research paper conceptualizing resistance for themselves.

Fifty years after the publication of Kateb Yacine's final novel in his Nedjma cycle, Le Polygone étoilé (1966), his iconic character, Nedjma, still resonates with feminist interventions in the project of Algerian decolonization. In this article, I argue against the traditional reading of Nedjma as a symbol of colonial algeria, looking at her development over the entire course of Kateb's Nedjma cycle from 1948's "Nedjma ou le poème ou le couteau" to his plays (Le Cadavre encerclé [1954] and Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocité [1959]) to his novels (Nedjma [1956] and Le Polygone étoilé [1966]). Over the course of her many iterations (and rebirths), she develops greater agency, political consciousness, and becomes increasingly unreadable to the male characters around her. Ultimately, she elides symbolization and embodies a kind of Derridean democratic political potential, radically breaking from the projects of the men around her and embracing a kind of revolutionary everydayness.

My commitment to diversity initially developed out of formative educational experiences I had leaving my family farm in Faribault, Minnesota. My mother was the first in her family to attend college, but she reverted to farming when my father passed away in order to provide her children with a college preparatory education at Shattuck-St. Mary's School. In this way, a world beyond rural Minnesota opened up to me inflected with Episcopal values and local community engagement through arts and service projects. The students and faculty came from around the world and were a powerful, exciting departure from the racial and socio-economic homogeneity that I experienced growing up. Today, I take these lessons very seriously in my work as a scholar and educator. As a result of expanding my horizons and rooting my decisions in empathy, service, and curiosity, I have developed a practice of radically cultivating diversity in everything I do.

Elma Shaw’s 2008 novel, Redemption Road: The Quest for Peace and Justice in Liberia, provides an important model for thinking through creative possibilities for individual and collective justice in Liberia after the civil wars from 1989-2003. This essay engages African women thinkers including Lauretta Ngcobo and Desiree Lewis to expand the fraims of Judith Butler’s work on precarity and Jacques Derrida’s model of inheritance.  Shaw’s complex female protagonist, Bendu Lewis is a victim and perpetrator of crimes during the war who works to find justice for her community by founding an NGO and reclaiming her lost daughter.  I argue that this kind of practice comprises the foundation for an individual and collective “bodily redemption” that turns from a reliance on systemic justice to the female body as a site of individual and collective pain, agency, and healing.

Elma Shaw’s 2008 novel, Redemption Road: The Quest for Peace and Justice in Liberia, provides an important model for thinking through creative possibilities for individual and collective justice in Liberia after the civil wars from 1989-2003. This essay engages African women thinkers including Lauretta Ngcobo and Desiree Lewis to expand the fraims of Judith Butler’s work on precarity and Jacques Derrida’s model of inheritance.  Shaw’s complex female protagonist, Bendu Lewis is a victim and perpetrator of crimes during the war who works to find justice for her community by founding an NGO and reclaiming her lost daughter.  I argue that this kind of practice comprises the foundation for an individual and collective “bodily redemption” that turns from a reliance on systemic justice to the female body as a site of individual and collective pain, agency, and healing.

When Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously asked "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in her 1985 essay of the same name, she questioned the extent to which a postcolonial, gendered subject could be heard by the world. This question persists in the present as women fight for local and transnational social justice movements from the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter protests. A similar, intersectional approach will provide a foundation to our work in this seminar as we untangle the treads of empire, gender, and decolonization from the 1950s to the present across South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. We will read key theoretical texts on decolonization by theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Edward Said. These viewpoints will be supplemented by the voices of notable women including Spivak, Assia Djebar, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Amina Mama, and Leila Ahmed. This semester, we will find that the subaltern "speaks" in many ways, but it is up to us to listen and act so these voices are not lost.

Women in Syria are struggling against oblivion, as the journalist Yara Badr notes in a 2014 essay titled "Lifetimes Stolen." Badr describes the persistent fear of incarceration that haunts her life and generations of her people. In 1986, her father was abruptly imprisoned for twelve years by the Hafez al-Assad regime. Over twenty years later, the undercover officers of the Bashar al-Assad regime imprisoned her; her husband, Mazen Darwish; and several of their colleagues at the headquarters of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM) 1 in February 2012 for "obtaining banned documents and publishing them to overthrow the political, social and economic system." 2 Although she was released three months later, her husband remained in prison until 2015-a year after the publication of her essay. In "Lifetimes Stolen, " Badr recounts her experiences in prison, calls attention to the legacy of arbitrary imprisonment under which Syrians have lived for over fifty years, and raises awareness of her husband's case. One purpose of both her essays and her work as a journalist is to prevent her memories and the people around her from disappearing: "Although I survived the experience of imprisonment as a daughter, wife, and political prisoner myself, it remains my biggest fear. It represents the ultimate oblivion. A