Faculty Spotlight
Dr. James Ivory
Dr. James Ivory is sitting in his neat office wearing a nice shirt, tie and jacket (often black). He is stylishly dressed and well-presented. It goes with his idea about teaching: a performance that captures a student’s attention and conveys a certain amount of information. Dr. Ivory is the Assistant Chair of the English department and an Associate Professor. This is his eleventh year at Appalachian State University.
For Dr. Ivory, it is the certainty of uncertainty that literature presents that first drew him into the subject. Literary theory presents many possibilities without definitive conclusions. This allows students of all backgrounds to come into his class with different ideas that are still all valid. He brings a passion to the subject and encourages students to find their own passion in whatever subject or field.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Dr. Ivory moved to Harlem in New York City as a toddler. He lived briefly in Norfolk, VA as an adolescent, but at 12 he settled with his grandparents in Eden, NC. He got a degree in English from Wake Forest University in 1985 and his Masters and PhD from UNC at Chapel Hill. Previous to pursuing English, Dr. Ivory was involved in the JROTC at college at Wake and thought he might become a career military officer, but after college he decided to try it in the business world.
Dr. Ivory’s expertise lays in 20th century British Literature. He wrote his thesis on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. He sees little distinction between reading for enjoyment and reading for work. He enjoys the idea of teaching classes that are outside the literary canon and once taught a Modern Studies class on Harry Potter. He feels that freshman and sophomore classes that may involve non-English majors are a great place to include different kinds of literature.
As a teacher, Dr. Ivory feels that he is just another reader in his class. He may be a reader with different experiences, but believes that his students have their own bit of authority on a work. He wants his students not to be intimidated but to see him as a human being. He brings his ideas to the class but is not closed off from his students’ ideas. He is interested in the barrier that sometimes forms between a professor and students and how to break that barrier down. Academia, to him, is about breaking down many barriers including race, class, and gender.
Outside of academia, Dr. Ivory is married to another professor, Dr. Betsy Beaulieu, who is an assistant coordinator in the Heltzer Honors Program. They have an 11-year old son, Sebastian. Dr. Ivory enjoys all kinds of movies from the provocative to the “fluffy.” He likes working out and playing golf, though he firmly asserts that he is not obsessed with golf. He takes care in his appearance, listens to music and tries to keep up with pop culture as much as he can, so that he can relate better to his students.
As Assistant Chair, he helps students navigate the requirements of the University. He attempts to understand the spirit of the rules at ASU and which questions to ask to get things accomplished for students.
Dr. Ivory encourages his students to explore something they love because that will give them more meaning in life. He encourages doing something for the benefit of others. He wishes that students take information outside of his class and talk about books from class in nonacademic situations. He feels that a liberal arts education introduces different ways to see the world and that literature is about the human condition. Literature constantly is changing with the times and posing new riddles to be unraveled.
~Jessica Goodman
Dr. Jeanne Dubino
Dr. Jeanne Dubino is sitting in her office with her leg in a cast elevated on a chair. Recently she got hit by a truck which broke four bones in her ankle. Yet, despite her injury, she is still persisting at her job and making her way around campus on crutches. Dr. Dubino is the Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University
As Chair, Dr. Dubino's chief role is that of an administrator. She helps manage the 85 faculty members and 15 graduate teaching assistants in the Department and ensures that they are happy and things are going smoothly. Part of her coordinating department activities includes spending four to five hours with e-mail making sure questions are answered. She loves her job, but says if there is any downside, it’s that she no longer has the frequent interaction with students she used to have from her previous position.
Dr. Dubino comes to us by way of Louisiana. She was chairing the English Department at Southeastern Louisiana University at the same time that Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005. Dr. Dubino stayed on at Southeastern for the following year. Fortunately, Southeastern itself suffered no damage, but many of its students and some of its faculty were deeply affected. Before Dr. Dubino moved to Louisiana in 2004 she was a professor at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. While she was there she chaired the Women’s Studies Program and the English Department. During her tenure at Plymouth, she was able to take a leave of absence to teach for two years at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. For her sabbatical in 2002-2003 she was a Fulbright Scholar/Lecturer at Egerton University in Njoro, Kenya.
Dr. Dubino earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1992. After she taught composition and introductory literature classes at the University of Massachusetts, she became an adjunct at Westfield State and Holyoke Community Colleges. She also taught as a substitute teacher in junior and senior high schools in western Massachusetts. She came to the University of Massachusetts from the University of Delaware, where she earned her MA in English, and before that, from Boston College. While she did major in English at Boston College, she almost finished a degree in chemistry; however, in the middle of her junior year she decided that reading books made her happier than spending 20 or more hours a week in the lab.
Her advice for students arises from her own experience--do what makes you happy. While she was a graduate student she also worked in many different kinds of offices"law, medicine, insurance, and so on"and in many different kinds of businesses"printing, department stores, a wedding shop, a trucking company, and so on. She also wove rugs on a 200-year-old loom and worked in McDonald’s and Dairy Queen. She is glad she spent her teens and twenties being exposed to all these different workplace environments"from working at so many different kinds of jobs, she learned what she didn’t want to do. She said that it may be difficult to figure out what you want to do, but that once you do decide, to purse your goal with energy, persistence, and patience. She said that of the three, persistence was for her the most important quality she needed to get a Ph.D.
She is married to Andrew Dubino and they have three dogs. She is interested in representations of dogs in literature and how our circles of sympathy have extended to understanding animals. Her first literary love is Virginia Woolf, and she has a picture of Woolf next to her desk, staring down at her. She wrote her dissertation on Woolf as a literary journalist. Now she also looks at Woolf as a traveler, and at other travel writing by nineteenth- and twentieth-century British travelers to the Middle East and East Africa. She thoroughly enjoys traveling and has been to almost thirty countries. When her ankle heals, she looks forward to walking and hiking again. In grad school she used to be an avid cyclist and hopes to resume that in Boone. She also wants to take up weaving again, an activity she picked up in grad school. In the meantime she reads avidly, including travel books, twentieth-century British and American novels, and magazines such as The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and others.
Her advice to students is to enjoy your time here, enjoy what you read, enjoy this environment; and make use of things around campus. Go out and try the exchange program to see a place that is different. She also firmly believes in the power of one person to change the world, and she encourages students to feel empowered.
Dr. Dubino’s own immediate goal is to be an effective chair"for her that means creating an atmosphere in the department so that faculty can excel in all three parts of their working life: scholarship, service, and above all, teaching. She wants all the faculty to be the best teachers they can be. We are lucky to have her working for us in the English Department.
~Jessica Goodman
