Laura Winkiel is an Associate Professor of English and the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
She is the co-editor of Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Her books include Modernism, Race and Manifestoes, which will be translated into Russian by AMS Press in 2025, and Modernism: The Basics, which will be expanded into a second edition in 2025. Her forthcoming book, Modernism and the Middle Passage (Columbia University Press), will also be published in 2025. It's going to be a big year for Laura!
Her current scholarship grew from her experience at Notre Dame. Here's her advice to current students:
Don’t be shy about finding an advisor and developing a good relationship where you can ask for input frequently. Don’t isolate: talk to your advisors, create writing and reading groups with your cohort of grad students, and look for ways to network more broadly across the profession, whether that’s attending conferences, going to institutes, archives, or other kinds of professional groups.
The English program empowers students to live up to these recommendations. The English Graduate Student Association, which is entirely organized by students and funded by the department, facilitates reading groups throughout the year. Incoming students are assigned faculty advisors before pairing with exam directors and, eventually, dissertation committees; doors are open for frequent advising. And since all Ph.D. students are provided with $2,000 in PD funding plus an annual budget from the department, they're well supported to network broadly.
Laura's experience and ongoing scholarship reveal what's possible when you make use of these opportunities.