Biography
Mary O'Shan Overton is currently an independent writer, scholar, and educator living and working in Nashville, Tennessee. Previously, Shan was the Founding Director of the Center for Writing and Learning Support at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary from 2017-2023, where she also served as an Adjunct Faculty Member, as the Faculty Mentor for and Developer of the Doctor of Ministry in Creative Writing and Public Theology program, and as the Host of the seminary's "BookTalks" webinar series. Her work has included a focus on equitable educational access and outcomes for all students and the expansion of professional development opportunities for adjunct faculty. She has published in a number of academic journals and popular magazines, including Religious Studies News, Reading Religion, Belt Magazine, and The Porch Magazine. Shan has experience as an academic copyeditor and has served on the Editorial Board of the AAR's Reading Religion since 2021. She is a the Co-convener of the Theological Writing Pedagogy Consortium and has been a Member of the AAR's Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Committee since 2023. Her long-term research interests include writing and practical theologies, transformative writing pedagogies, scholarly production for and beyond the academy, and the intersection of public theology and creative writing.
Candidate Statement
In conversations with colleagues in the US and abroad, I often ask the question, Whose academy is this, anyway? I believe this is a good way to frame the space where we need to begin a conversation about contingent faculty and academia itself. As a current member of the AAR Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Committee and as a member of the Editorial Board of the AAR’s Reading Religion, I ask this question with committee members and editorial board members, other AAR members, and AAR leadership, not only to unearth the often-unexamined assumptions and structures beneath the question itself, but also to imagine and build another possible future for all of us.
To these ends, I envision the role of Contingent Faculty Director as one of convening generative conversations using inventive approaches in order to examine problems and uncover opportunities and possibilities. I envisage something different for ourselves and for the academy itself. But the route these questions will take, we will have to find together. In one of its best senses, an academy is a community of practice where we can consider what kind of community we have been, what we are now, and what we hope to be.
This shared inquiry must lead us through generative questions like the following: What does our community of practice look like? What are its boundaries? What are its practices? What constitutes meaning within it? How do individuals and groups develop identities through the practices? Who decides? How do these constructs spill over beyond the boundaries of our practices into wider society? Beyond this, we must ask what we want the community and its practices, boundaries, meanings, and identities to become, and in what ways we wish to effect transformations within and beyond the academy itself.
When I contemplate this shared work, I recall two lines from Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Leaflets,” which I keep next to my desk on a small, blue, wrinkled and stained sticky note. It says, "I am thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need.” I am thinking that, during this time in which everything we have taken for granted is turning over, contingent faculty and our colleagues have a portal through which we can enter to explore what we already have so we may invent what we need. I am thinking that we might create an academy that better reflects the insights of everyone involved in scholarship and teaching, from whatever place or position we happen to inhabit, to bring into being an interconnected academy that truly belongs to all of us. If chosen to serve as a Director on the AAR's Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Committee, I will enthusiastically collaborate with the Committee and the AAR’s wider community as an intentional community of practice to (in Rich’s words) “reconstitute the world.” It would be a great privilege for me to serve the AAR's members in this manner.