Meeting student need: two new permanent faculty starting this fall to meet class demand

by Abigail Cordwell

Over the past five years, the demand for Gender Studies classes has been growing significantly. Due to this, the Center was approved to add two new permanent positions, one in-person and one online, starting this fall. We are excited to introduce Dr. Pip Gordon and Dr. Daniel McCarthy Howard, both of whom will take on instructional assistant professor roles within the department. I had the opportunity to get to know a little more about their personal and academic work, which I am very excited to share with everyone. 

About Dr. Pip Gordon: 

Many of you will already know Dr. Phillip “Pip” Gordon, who is joining the Center as an Instructional Assistant Professor of Gender Studies. He has an M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of Mississippi and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor for the last two years.

Do you have a favourite piece of queer media or literature that has been especially meaningful to you, either as a scholar or as a person?

This is actually a hard question to start with—do you know how much queer media and literature I consume that has extraordinary meaning to me both as a scholar and person????

Okay, actual answer: When I was growing up, queer media was relatively rare, especially compared to how much is available now. Films like Brokeback Mountain and literature like Angels in America were very influential to me as I came of age as a queer person. But without a doubt, the most influential and meaningful queer media for me as a scholar and person is the film Moonlight. It is just such a beautiful visual narrative of love and self-acceptance.

Where is your favorite place in Oxford, and what makes that place special to you?

I always love a good bookstore, and I can spend hours at Square Books, even on multiple consecutive days, just being around books and reading a few pages here and there of different books that grab my attention. But my favorite place in Oxford is the Molly Barr bike trail that runs from the Depot to Molly Barr Road. I walk or jog on that trail every day. It is smack in the middle of town but is always quiet and separate from the bustle around it.

Your work focuses a lot on the South and its queer dimensions. Could you tell us a little bit about your current research and how it fits in with your wider scholarship? What does the South mean to you?

Dr. Gordon (standing center) has been advising the Lavender LLC and several student organizations during his time as a visiting assistant professor. 

My work right now is heavily invested in exploring trans and non-binary experience, community, and identity in the South. The main focus is on a book project that takes a trans studies approach to the works of William Faulkner in the holistic way that I consider gay identity in my first book, Gay Faulkner. But whereas that book could rely on biographical data, to conceptualize trans Faulkner has led me to a more intertextual literary approach that bridges Faulkner’s work with more contemporary queer literature, especially queer YA literature, set in the South that often seems to be in conversation with works from the Southern Renaissance, especially Faulkner. The wonderful side effect of this work is that it has expanded my research into contemporary queer southern literature from a range of genres and a range of popular to more traditional “literary” categorizations. The South has long been and continues to be home to a rich tradition of queer communities and a continuing diversity of queer experience.

Outside of the classroom, you are involved with both the UM Pride Network and the Lavender LLC. Could you talk a bit more about your roles within these organizations— and how these roles shape both your academic work and your work as a professor?

It has always felt natural to me that teaching and mentorship are two sides of the same coin—I am a classroom professor and a mentor to students outside of the classroom, but both roles involve helping students grow through their experiences at the university. That growth occurs through academic and social learning. As an advisor to UM Pride Network and the Lavender LLC, I am engaging with students outside of the classroom but still as a professor whose role is to help them create the world they want to inhabit, despite whatever challenges they face (generally speaking, queer students still face many challenges unique to their experiences). The plus side for me is that I learn a great deal from my students about the ways they understand the ever-evolving landscape of queer identity and expression. I also encounter all sorts of new media and new takes on longstanding issues in queer communities. Indeed, if I introduce students in the classroom to Paris Is Burning and the history of the Stonewall Riots, my students outside of the classroom have introduced me to Chappell Roan, Will Wood, and Ethel Cain, among other new voices in queer expression.

About Dr. Daniel McCarthy Howard: 

We are excited to introduce Dr. Daniel McCarthy Howard as an online Instructional Assistant Professor of Gender Studies. They have a Doctorate of Musical Arts (DMA) in Music Performance and Literature with Graduate Minors in Gender and Women's Studies and Queer Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and will join the Isom Center faculty in the fall of 2025. 

With both your undergraduate and graduate degrees being in music performance, could you share a little bit more about your academic path and how it led you into Gender Studies? 

Dr. Daniel Howard McCarthy

I often tell people that I arrived at the field of Gender Studies “sideways.” While pursuing my doctorate, the degree program required candidates to complete a cognate, which is essentially a graduate-level minor. At the same time, I had crafted the idea that would eventually become my dissertation. As you mentioned, my training up to that time was largely as a classical performer, and I had very few opportunities to reflect on my experiences and identity while navigating the classical music world. For example, I was performing in concert halls and events that no one in my family could afford to attend, and playing music by individuals with whom I shared little in common. I wanted to conduct ethnographic research into other queer and minoritized individuals who were navigating this experience of identity formation in post-secondary music institutions. By pursuing coursework in queer studies, I learned not only the methodologies necessary to pursue this kind of ethnographic work, but also how queer theories and methods could offer unconventional approaches that might yield critical insights.

I’m also one of those people who loved being in school and learning new things. The more I learned in the field of Gender Studies, the more I saw a clear connection with it and music. Many theorists, for example, will draw upon examples from popular culture or art to demonstrate a particular concept, or to use for analysis. In my case, I’m interested in the ways that this process can work in reverse. How might the aesthetic (music, in my case) be used as an analytic to contribute to theory?

Lastly, it’s important to remember that long before the field of Gender Studies was codified in academia, it was emerging in social movements, activism, literature, art, film, and yes, music. Sometimes, I worry that we forget its important roots!

Do you have a favourite queer performer or composer?

Lately, I am in awe of Hayden Anhedönia, who records music as Ethel Cain. Her album Preacher’s Daughter completely floored me when I first heard it, from the incredible detail of the production, to the expertly-crafted lyrics. In terms of classical music, the music of Samuel Barber manages to move me every time. I have memories of listening to his “Hermit Songs” while quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic, which took on new meaning at that time.

Is there a scholar or theorist in the field who has really shaped the way you think or approach your work? 

Choosing just one is a challenge!

My training in Gender Studies centers queer of color critique and women of color feminisms.

For this, I am grateful to Ghassan Moussawi, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ghassan taught my graduate Queer Theory seminar, mentored my first teaching experiences in Gender and Women’s Studies, and later served as co-director for my dissertation. I credit him with pushing me to think more deeply and critically about my work.

I also must mention José Esteban Muñoz, whose writings I regularly return to. In the opening lines of Cruising Utopia, Muñoz writes, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” From his early work on ephemera as evidence, to the critical insights he offered into “brown feelings,” he really contributed to laying the groundwork for queer of color critique as we know it today.

Is there anything you are excited about when it comes to working at the University of Mississippi?

I’m very excited about working alongside my colleagues in the Sarah Isom Center, as well as meeting my new students. The university has already been incredibly supportive of my work at the intersections of music and Gender Studies, and I look forward to being able to share this in my courses and published scholarship!