蜜柚视频

After completing a five-year agenda of presenting and publishing his research, Dr. Tony M. Vinci, Associate Professor of English at 蜜柚视频 Chillicothe, is looking forward to slowing down, taking a nap, and maybe spending some time with his cat, Poe. Since becoming a professor in 2014, Vinci has published and presented over 500 pages of original peer-reviewed scholarship in books and journals and at conferences around the globe. While focusing on the study of literature and culture, his scholarship engages topics as varied as the ethics of reading holocaust survivor testimony, racial traumas in fantasy and science fiction, and the experimental philosophies expressed by American women writers in the 1950s.

鈥淚t鈥檚 fun and exhausting, but it鈥檚 worth it,鈥� he commented. 鈥淚鈥檝e been teaching for 20 years, and I still get nervous before every class I teach. All the research鈥攖he endless reading and writing and revising鈥攕hows my students that I鈥檓 still a student, too.鈥�

Vinci鈥檚 recent scholarship focuses on a few primary questions: 鈥淗ow might literature invite us to rethink our ethical obligations to others in pain? How might fantasy or science fiction help us become more vulnerable, more attentive to others? How might strange stories about nonhumans (ghosts, animals, androids, monsters, etc.) help us understand our own psychologies and our own cultures from new and surprising points of view?鈥�

While all are distinctive topics, Vinci explained that there is a common theme in his work, which is that 鈥渨e should read to be transformed. The person who enters a book should not be the same person who finishes it. All the weird stuff I study and teach is trying to change us; it鈥檚 trying to make us a little kinder, a little more open to otherness. Instead of being, literature asks us to become.鈥�

鈥淚f I read a weird novel about different worlds, different species, humans falling in love with monsters, etc., then that should help me sustain curiosity about people who grew up poorer than I did or richer than I did; it should help me care more deeply about folks who think differently than I do or those who come from different cultural or social backgrounds than mine; it should make me ask new questions about the animals in my life and the millions and millions of lives with which I share the planet.鈥�

Coming from a violent, hostile childhood in New York, Vinci explained that his background is very important in regard to his scholarship.

He revealed, 鈥淚鈥檝e witnessed and experienced a great deal of abuse and sexual violence when I was a kid. Out of respect for my family, I try not to get too specific in print, but members of my family were sex trafficked at a very young age, and, well, that was just the beginning of our troubles. Needless to say, education was not important in my household. I didn鈥檛 really attend school. I didn鈥檛 read a book until I was 18 years old. I was completely uneducated as a young adult. I was never supposed to go to college let alone become an English professor. I was supposed to just work and make money. So, instead of going to school, I worked on a farm, I worked as a laborer for my brother鈥檚 mason business, I worked in a factory, I worked as a cook, I ran a convenient store, I taught guitar. My sister made my try college, and even then, I didn鈥檛 even apply until the Friday before classes began. I didn鈥檛 have the grades or the test scores or the money or the family connections or the status, but they let me in. I am so grateful for my college professors because, even though I didn鈥檛 have a clue how to think or study, they didn鈥檛 kick me out. They let me stay and kind of do my thing until I finally figured out how to be a student.鈥�

Vinci explained that his past is part of what drives him. He commented, 鈥淚 think about it all the time: Why did all that happen? Why were the women in my family treated as they were? Why did we all work so hard for so little? Why didn鈥檛 anyone at the school try to stop any of the abuse that was so obvious?鈥�

He continued on to explain that the current sex trafficking problem in Chillicothe is one of the main reasons why he chose to teach here. He r