Sample cover letter for Full Time position at UNiversity

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

I write to express my interest in the Black/Africana Studies tenure-track position at the Texas Christian University Department of English. As a Vanderbilt University Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellow, I am currently completing my dissertation, Missing Miami: Rethinking Region, Nation, and Diversity and will defend it by May 2017. My fellowship prioritizes interdisciplinary research, and through my participation in it, I have developed a project that contributes to, and asks critical questions of, Afro-Diasporic Studies, Caribbean Studies, ethnic studies, urban studies, and critical race studies. A culmination of my career as a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, this project has prepared me to fulfill the TCU English Department’s imperatives of interdisciplinary research and teaching, and mindfulness towards inclusivity. TCU English’s manifold course offering prominently reflects these imperatives, and I look forward to developing new syllabi to explore, and expand, the broader stakes of my research interests in TCU undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

In my dissertation, I treat Miami, Florida as a metonym of the U.S. I argue that the city’s celebrated diversity obfuscates anti-black prejudice and practices in favor of representing Miami, and other allegedly diverse places, as cosmopolitan contact zones. Instead of diversity, I find a variety of elisions that disguise the displacement and disenfranchisement of Black Americans and immigrants as lighter-complected émigrés, notably Cubans, assimilate into U.S. sociopolitical and economic spheres. In some cases, immigration into Miami altered, even thwarted, the course of the Civil Rights Movement there. The elision of cultural and racial difference within émigré populations also hides the effects of regional and international politics, particularly U.S. immigration policies, on diasporic subjectivity. In short, diversity myths belie the complexities, tensions, and the violence that constitute the city and form the backbone of my dissertation, which examines Miami’s Black American, Haitian American, Cuban American, and white American populations through analyses of respective cultural artifacts. With my application, I have included a chapter on Haitian immigration into Miami, which merges theories of Black and Caribbean Studies to demonstrate the Afro-Diasporic stakes of my research.

I intend to revise my dissertation for publication within the next two years, focusing on further contextualizing the project within national narratives. The project will join other recent scholarship about Miami, a trend that reflects a necessary emphasis on diverse locales in the wake of the U.S.’s cultural shift: by 2060, the U.S., especially its major cities, will closely resemble Miami’s demographic, which boasts a majority of residents born outside of the U.S (51.7% as of 2013). My doctoral work has inspired other interests, including a project on literatures of 20^th and 21^st century Black-centered social movements in which I plan to explore strategies of resistance within Afro-Diasporic communities.

My project’s transnational scope aligns with Texas Christian University’s emphasis on global education and uses a transportable method that links local investigation to international affairs. I anticipate teaching the undergraduate Introduction to Literature of the Global African Diaspora, a course that would allow me to test the argument(s) of my current research project in a variety of locales. The courses I have designed and independently taught at Vanderbilt are foundational to my future instruction of TCU’s introductory literature/writing courses, and the African American Literature, U.S. Multi- Ethnic Literature, Prison Literature, Contemporary Latino/a Literature, and Popular Literature courses. At the graduate level, I anticipate developing my own versions of the Race and Gender in American Literature, Literature of Latina/o Diaspora, and Contemporary African-American Literature courses.

Given its sociopolitical stakes, my research has always energized my teaching, especially with increasingly public conversations about inclusion on college and university campuses. In my first semester of teaching, I designed a course that directly reflected the objectives of my still-germinating dissertation idea. “Which South?: Conceptions of the US American South from the 1860s-1980s”asked students to develop their writing skills in the context of interrogating stereotypical conceptions of the South. Throughout the semester, we searched for continuities across decades and modes of representation, and the course culminated with a written project and presentation in which students researched how anti-black violence and immigration had affected their respective hometowns. Students thus left the class with an understanding of the widespread effects of racism, with some students emailing me after the course to detail how it had inspired participation in social justice campus organizations and publications in the campus newspaper.

Those who have observed my teaching have remarked on my seamless integration of writing instruction with literary analysis and on my determined integration of issues of difference and inequality. After the success of my first class, I was determined to refine my pedagogy, having realized the ethical imperatives of teaching these issues in our contemporary moment. I sought out additional training from the CFT and Writing Studio, through which I learned integral pedagogical skills that consistently invigorated my teaching by introducing new strategies for managing classroom dynamics when discussing charged subjects, including race, gender, sexuality, and class and balancing these discussions with writing instruction. I ultimately facilitated a course for the CFT in which I introduced pedagogical concepts to graduate students in a variety of disciplines.The CFT’s emphasis on teaching for social justice and integrating real-world experience in the classroom inspired me to take students in my “Police Brutality” composition course to the university archives. In class, we had discussed individual instances of police brutality within broader legacies of U.S. race relations, guided in part by visits from campus and community organizers critical of the university’s management of diversity. In the archives, I asked students to historicize this criticism by learning about Vanderbilt’s desegregation, its role in the Civil Rights movement, and contemporary policies that help (or hinder) the development of an inclusive campus.

As I anticipate continuing my research and work in the classroom as a dedicated and enthusiastic member of TCU’s Department of English, I look forward to teaching within and beyond the African-American canon and working with colleagues to maintain a curriculum that attends to our educational needs in an increasingly interconnected world.

In addition to this letter, please find my CV and writing sample. I can provide letters of recommendation and additional materials upon request.