(3) Yerace, M., Rogers, K. S., Seifeddine, G., Weech, S., Berchtold, J., Giles, D., & Dilger, B. (2026). Socializing our Research: Using team communication platforms to build collaboration and professionalization in early-career researchers [Conference proceedings proposal under review].
Team Communication Platforms (TCPs), increasingly popular in workplaces, create unique digital spaces for academic research, socialization, and collaboration. TCPs can make learning and mentoring more visible for early-career researchers through community building. Further, TCPs such as Slack, Basecamp, or Discord support collaboration across timezones and move critical activities like asking and answering questions into public forums, increasing not only efficiency but transparency. We bring these workplace tools and their benefits to scholarship on research groups, particularly for collaboration and graduate mentorship.
(2) Yerace, M., Rogers, K. S., Seifeddine, G., Smith, A. W., & Dilger, B. (2026, March). Jobs in English and Transdisciplinary Studies: A conversation on distributed mentoring frameworks for job market preparation [Conference presentation]. Conference on College Composition & Communication, Cleveland, OH.
(1) 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.