Jennifer Natalya Fink

Associate Professor of English
Age: 47
Hometown: Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Ithaca, N.Y., with stops in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Boston, Mass.
Education: B.A. Wesleyan University, feminist performance (self-designed); M.A. Art Institute of Chicago, performance and fine arts; Ph.D. New York University, performance studies
Area of research: Experimental fiction and performance studies
Time at Georgetown: 10 years
Courses Taught: Ignatius seminar (performing identity), honors English pro-seminar, performance studies classes, Level 1 — Introduction to Fiction Writing, experimental fiction workshop for advanced undergrads, graduate classes in experimental fiction, queer memoir

What’s the most memorable encounter you’ve had with a student?
What I’m struck by is the hidden poverty of many of our students. There are many students who come to me and say, “My financial aid check hasn’t cleared yet, and I can’t buy the books,” or “I need to go home because I need to pay my mother’s healthcare bills.” I think there’s an assumption of middle class here, and poverty is invisible, but it’s very real for many students. I’ve had several of those encounters, and they are shocking to me — students who are supporting their families on their work-study job, and it’s not just one. It’s not this rare thing. It’s not uncommon.

What’s the most fascinating question in your field or research?
I’m fascinated by realism, which often seems to be the most conservative form. It seems ordinary, what we already know; it’s conventional. Both in its origins, I found, and its innovations, it actually is one of the most complex problems because the real itself is utterly fictional.

How did you come to study the subject of experimental fiction? What is experimental fiction?
I actually came to this through the backdoor of performance studies, where I became more interested in narration and storytelling than live performance. I was already fascinated with how the forms of art necessarily have to change, be changed, be challenged, be transformed, to represent new ways of being in the world, new people, new kinds of stories and how the new kinds of people, new kinds of identity in the world, change stories — not just the content but also the form, and even what we understand a story to be. So, the relationship between new kinds of people, forcing their way into the representative sphere, and the forms that art takes. New stories necessitate new methods.

What’s the greatest challenge you face in teaching?
Asking students to experiment with rather than master material. Our students are in the mode of mastering — like, “I want to know the answer” — and I’m exploding that and asking them to explore ideas and modes of discourse, ways of thinking, ways of making that feel new and unknown and you can’t really master. I think that’s a different set of muscles that goes against what our students are developing. … To kind of let go of the desire to master and really rigorously explore the unknown.

What’s your favorite book?
I don’t have a favorite book. I don’t believe in favorite books because to make a book a favorite is to deaden it to me. It’s a closed discourse. It’ll be the next book I read that really challenges me to explore what I think I know about subjectivity. I haven’t read my favorite book yet.

What would be your ideal course to teach?
That’s one of the pleasures of teaching at Georgetown. At a great university like Georgetown, we are teaching the work we do. Whether I’m teaching an Ignatius seminar for freshmen or at the grad level, on some level I’m teaching what I do, and I think that’s the ideal for most professors.

What drew you to Georgetown?  
Georgetown has some of the greatest experimental writers in the world here, so I have a community and colleagues who are brilliant and engaged in the work that I am most interested in and am myself doing. And, we have wonderful students.

What are your impressions of Georgetown students?
Extraordinarily driven. An odd mixture of extremely conventional and extremely curious. Open-minded, which I wasn’t sure they would be. Very open-minded. Some students who’ve said that my class is their favorite have been extremely conservative, not just in politics but in every way.

What would you be doing if you weren’t in academia?
Writing

What’s something you wish more students would take away from your courses?
I’m really happy for students to take away what they need to take away. I don’t want to tell them what to take away.

Interview by Penny Hung