Guest Editors’ Introduction: Personal and Pedagogical Perspectives

In early summer 2021 Amy Hamilton, the editor of Western American Literature, invited us to guest edit this special issue on the work of emerging scholars. She, and we, thought we might be uniquely suited to it because, as PhD candidates and as the graduate student representatives to the Western Literature Association, we are ourselves emerging scholars in the field. We curated an issue of our peers, joining them in contouring the growing edges of western American literary studies. We cannot underscore enough the importance of this move, which put the “peer” in peer review, and thank Amy for the insight and humility she showed in inviting us to edit this issue.

The previous WAL issue of this kind, the spring and summer 2013 “Young Scholars” issue, came out nearly ten years ago. That issue was edited by Dr. Krista Comer, who has graciously written an afterword for this issue that traces a scholarly arc between the earlier issue and ours. Because of Krista’s afterword, we will not go into details about the content of the previous issue but will only state that, within and outside of the academy, a great deal has changed in the last nine years. If we are to attempt to summarize this ponderous decade, we might say that it has been characterized by precarity. The tenure-track academic job market, particularly in the humanities, has continued to worsen both steadily and dramatically, leading to increased uncertainty—and consequently anxiety—around employment for scholars. Emerging scholars must often accept non-tenure-track appointments without security or leave the academy entirely. Academic organizations, including the Western Literature Association, have also become more precarious, with declining membership numbers forcing a reconsideration of purposes and goals. And of course the COVID-19 pandemic, which has completely transformed nearly every aspect of all of our lives, has accelerated already existing forms of academic precarity and introduced us to many more—for example, many of us, especially those with risk factors that increase our vulnerability to COVID infection, might experience the classroom or other university spaces as precariously unsafe.

As a result of this all-pervading precarity, we chose to shift from the “Young Scholars” of the previous issues to “Emerging Scholars,” so as to deemphasize chronological age and emphasize a more active reshaping of academic standing—and in our call for abstracts, we explicitly defined emerging status by precarity within the academic system, welcoming submissions from graduate students, pre-tenure or non-tenure-track instructors, and scholars outside the academy, among others.

While humanities departments have been undergoing years-long tectonic shifts that greatly affect emerging scholars, the COVID-19 pandemic and current episodic conditions have forced us to confront new waves of academic fallout, many spurred by rapidly decreasing funding, dissolution of tenure-track positions, and ever-present biased, racist, and ableist educational practices that maintain the established hierarchies. Especially since the publishing of the 2013 “Young Scholars” issue of WAL, emerging scholars have called these complexities into question, building scholarship, research, and pedagogical practices that are designed to challenge such academic concerns readily and courageously. The scramble to find a foothold within academia is often accompanied by the pressure to publish. Thus, one aim of this issue is to alleviate this pressure by offering an important publishing opportunity for often occluded voices. The essays contained in this issue reflect the current epoch of academic work, much of which is categorized by inclusivity—as it relates to insight, genre and form, and teaching ethics. Likewise, we believe these essays contribute to the current cohort of scholars working to help shape a new face of academia.

It has been exciting and energizing to edit this special issue because much of the work of making academia more inclusive and responsive is especially alive in the field of western American studies, which has been contending with a legacy of traditional, unabashedly settler colonial western imagery. The American West and its literature and culture are embedded with issues that have plagued scholars of the field. For instance, our members are long-time...