Gender: Spinster Panic

Abstract

The offices of my home department, American Studies, are located within the building that is the center of graduate school life, the Hall of Graduate Studies. It’s a beautiful neo-Gothic building, built in the 1930s but evoking the architecture of its Anglo-Saxon predecessors—Oxford and Cambridge.1 As you face the building, there are three entryways. The imposing iron gate directly in front requires you to lean into it with your full body weight, until you are rewarded with a view of the manicured courtyard. The door to the right takes you past the Graduate School’s administrative offices and into the Common Room, where you try to run into friends between meetings. The entryway to the left is of particular importance to me, as it leads to a hallway of offices belonging to the professors of American Studies. At the end of that hallway is the American Studies seminar room, in which all of the major life stages occur. There, I was welcomed into the program by the director of graduate studies; there, I shook with anxiety throughout my qualifying exams; there, my dissertation proposal passed my full committee.