Issue 05
Amanda Emerson
Just before the bottom fell out of the economy, in August 2008, with President Obama's injunction to contribute to change ringing in her ears, Amanda Emerson resigned a tenure-track faculty appointment in the English Department at a moderate sized state university to pursue a degree in nursing. Amanda’s short-lived academic career produced a dissertation (Brown Univ, 2004) and articles on how writers of the early Republic and the nineteenth century represented the idea of equality in fiction and political rhetoric. Her work appears in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies; Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers; and NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. As an impoverished nursing student, Amanda now survives on happy dreams of healing bodies and spirits and writing books while traveling the world. She lives in the Kansas City-metro area with her husband Oleg, a Russian emigré, with whom she is in the process of “flipping” a house—if by “flipping” one means haphazardly disassembling. She intends eventually to relocate to within smelling distance of an ocean. View all of Amanda's Revolving Floor contributions.
5When I was a university professor, before I quit to go back to school to become a nurse, I found myself nervous and irritated with pretty much everyone and everything all the time. That may be partially a result of temperament, but some of my constant sense of aggravation must have arisen from the nature of the work I was doing. What never failed to distress me was the endless string of faculty meetings. At least at the university where I worked, these meetings were neverending and, like most things bureaucratic, were almost always pointless. I don’t think my experience was unique. Faculty meetings are pretty much the same everywhere. The size of an institution may matter some but probably not much.
