Sonja Fritzsche & Dustin De Felice

Sonja Fritzsche and Dustin De Felice
Sonja Fritzsche and Dustin De Felice

Project Summary

The College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University is implementing the Charting a Pathway to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) model via a multi-phase approach. This model provides for inclusive, evaluative definitions of academic labor that enable faculty of all appointment types to be seen and to also see themselves as equally integral parts to the mission of a university. Rather than be determined by narrow disciplinary definitions of productivity with hermetic lists of publication venues, the model rests upon the values of this work – reciprocity, transparency, creativity, and equity – that can be interchanged with other personal or professional values as needed. At the center is the everyday goal of intellectual leadership as intentional practice that is enacted via the foundational academic priorities of sharing knowledge, expanding opportunities, mentoring and stewardship. The project at hand will create a unit-based mentoring program for non-tenure stream faculty and academic staff in the College of Arts & Letters using the CPIL model. Team members include Dustin DeFelice, Karen Kangas-Preston, Kate Birdsall, and members of the College Advisory Committee Task Force on Non-tenure Stream Career Pathways.

Biography

Sonja Fritzsche

Sonja Fritzsche is Professor of German Studies and Associate Dean for Academic Personnel and Administration in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. She served as Chair of the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures from 2015-2017. Her research expertise is twentieth/twenty-first century German Studies, particularly comparative Cold War/Eastern European utopian film/literature and disability studies. Her publications include Science Fiction Literature in East Germany (2006), The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film (2014) and Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East (2018) with Anindita Banerjee. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction and is the founder and co-editor with Gerry Canavan of the book series World Science Fiction Studies with Peter Lang Oxford. Currently she is co-PI on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership ($2.5 million) funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. Fritzsche was a Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Academic Leadership Program Fellow 2017-2018 and served as President of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) in 2015.

Dustin De Felice

Dr. Dustin De Felice is the Director of the English Language Center at Michigan State University. As an Associate Professor with two decades on the job, Dustin has a passion for working with teachers, learners, and organizations in creating an environment of success. As a scholar, he has explored language teaching and learning through qualitative inquiries, and he is particularly interested in technology as it relates to the development of materials and its use in traditional and virtual classrooms. His teaching has taken him around the US and Mexico, and he regularly advocates for language learning at Michigan State University and beyond.