an ode to Julie Wonka

Here's the full text of my introduction of Julie last night at the book party. People laughed. It was good.

What I love about Julie Jung: a list
1. She was a college Republican
2. She was a math major
3. She’s an incredibly smart, thoughtful, innovative, and caring colleague
4. She cracks me up like nobody else in this department

As many of you know, I am deeply invested both personally and professionally in blurring the lines between the artificial categories of “the personal” and “the professional.” People often laugh when I tell the story of my interview here last year when, after I asked the ten or so people interviewing me what they were looking for in a candidate, Julie responded, “I just want a friend.” In her book, Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, Julie refers to moments like this as “putting the wrong things together,” but I’d like to take this opportunity to revise that phrasing: there’s nothing wrong with the things Julie puts together. Indeed, the beauty of Julie’s work is that it is a demonstration of the knowledge that can come from challenging categories that tend to reify themselves, even in a department committed to an English Studies model. I can’t put it any better than she does: in her preface, Julie writes that putting wrong things together has provided her with “an experiential knowledge base that has motivated much of my scholarly work—the knowledge that disrupting expectations can result in expanded and revised points of view, that from such disruptions one can develop the epistemological pliancy one needs to negotiate responsibly in an ever-changing world.” Julie’s book demonstrates the epistemological potential of the multigenre essay. She writes, “By refusing to ‘fit in’ to the conventions of any one genre or subfield, and yet by building alliances with several different genres at once, multigenre texts demand new and better kinds of listening.” It occurs to me as I read this that this description applies to the entire book and to Julie the person we all know and love. By refusing to fit in to the conventions of any one subfield, and yet by building alliances with several different subfields at once, Revisionary Rhetorics, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts demands new and better kinds of listening. We cannot approach this book the way we would any other scholarly work. Julie’s work challenges us to confront the ways that we—in person and in writing—often avoid disruptions in favor of apparent seamlessness. Julie’s work challenges us to put the wrong things together and, in doing so, to revise our experiences of disruption. I’ll end with my favorite line from her book, one that I’ve posted above my computer at home: “If it is true that we can revise only what is written, maybe it is also true that we can write only what has been revised.”

Congratulations, Julie.