An interview conducted by Alexander Matkowsky, 1st Year MA/Graduate Assistant in English
This week I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Kimberly Takahata, the English Department’s new Assistant Professor of “Literature of the Americas to 1900”, who is currently teaching the undergraduate courses “American Literature Traditions 1” and “Race & Ethnicity in American Literature” in the Fall 2021 semester. Dr. Takahata pursued her undergraduate degree at Brown University and completed her graduate work and PhD at Columbia, working as a postdoctoral instructor at the West Point United States Military Academy. Her field of study, “Early American Literature”, is quite broadly defined; she works primarily with Long Eighteenth Century texts from Massachusetts down through the Caribbean.
I asked her how her interest in this specific field came about. During her undergraduate experience, she found herself to be one of only a few students “jazzed by” Early American poetry and Puritan texts, and she couldn’t help but feel that there was more to learn from these literatures. Taking her particular focus to graduate school, she realized that the kinds of questions she had been asking when evaluating these works were applicably helpful in other geographies and developed an additional attachment to Indigenous Studies. Therefore, thinking at the intersection of both fields became a logical (and interesting!) academic pursuit. A desire to teach others coincided with her studies. She explained how she “had felt strongly that literature matters and wanted to be able to tell people why”; she was excited by the idea of “exploring works alongside many others who are in agreement regarding the importance of literary studies.”
The focus of the interview then turned towards a discussion of Dr. Takahata’s ongoing projects. She is delighted to be one of several scholars involved with the online edition of The Sugar Cane, a project focused on the 1764 georgic poem set in the West Indies. This collaborative venture incorporates several Early American educators with the primary goal of “figuring out how to center Black and Indigenous life” in the massive text so that the colonial progression of the British Empire (so typically associated with the literary canon) isn’t prioritized as per the norm. Dr. Takahata is looking forward to expanding on her dissertation research – to identify how to read for structural foundations of Indigenous life in American literature instead of merely including the narrative as supplementary information coinciding with the traditionally canonical.
I then posited the ultimate question – “what has you most excited about working at Villanova?” Dr. Takahata is so grateful for the feeling of community that she gets from the students of the English department. The commitment that we have to anti-racist thinking, inclusion, and equity have been so important to her in imagining herself being here, and now more so with her actually being here. She is absolutely excited by “the way it feels that we are all trying to figure out how to make [literature] worth what it deserves to be worth”; bringing her ideas into the classroom and hearing students come up with some incredible responses “has been really amazing.” She hopes for the prospect of field trips to arise within her courses (when COVID restrictions are lifted); current and prospective students will have the opportunity to truly immerse themselves, what with the locality of her selected Early American texts to the greater Philadelphia area.
Dr. Takahata closed our interview with a piece of information that she wished to convey: she is “really excited to be here and to learn with/alongside students and to hear all their thoughts – to dive into the literature together!”
Thank you to Dr. Kimberly Takahata for taking the time to share her academic journey with Villanova students and faculty! I can with no doubt reiterate that Villanova welcomes you to its English department. We are certainly looking forward to your interesting pedagogy among such a diverse assembly of outstanding professors!
