Rogers, K. S., Yerace, M., Giles, D., Deptula, A., Berchtold, J., Smith, A. W., Weech, S., & Dilger, B. (2025). Recursive, horizontal, distributed, networked: Iterating transdisciplinary models of mentorship in the humanities. In Symposium on Intergenerational Graduate Mentorship, Gaillet, L. L., Ridolfo, J., Micciche, L., & Young, M. (Eds.), Rhetoric Review, vol. 44, no. 3, 18-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2025.2526870
Within the humanities, mentorship is often imagined as a relationship between one experienced faculty member and one student. While this dyad model allows students to develop skills and build relationships with faculty as they enter their fields of study, it can also limit students’ exposure to other methods, practices, and perspectives. For a “dappled” discipline like ours, consideration of other methods of mentorship is necessary to meet the needs of increasingly interdisciplinary students (Carlo and Enos; Lauer; Phelps). Yet in the one-to-one model, students may struggle to find mentors with shared interests as programs are impacted by retirements and austerity measures. As the academic job market changes, mentors who have not experienced the recent job market will face difficulty providing up-to-date support to their mentees (Leverenz; Sano-Franchini). In our mentoring group, named “Disseminar” (a portmanteau based on its original purpose as a seminar for required dissertation research hours), recursive and horizontal mentoring are our priority; graduate students, early career faculty, and senior faculty all provide and receive mentoring, professional development, and networking opportunities.