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Sumita
Lall Instructor, English
Helpful Links: http://www.venturacollege.edu/
( http://students.vcccd.edu/index.htm
(Student Central) http://www.venturacollege.edu/services_for_students/index.shtml
(Student Services List) http://www.venturacollege.edu/departments/student_services/tutoring/index.shtml
( http://www.venturacollege.edu/departments/student_services/counseling/index.shtml
(Counseling) http://www.venturacollege.edu/departments/student_services/dsps_eac/index.shtml
( http://www.venturacollege.edu/departments/academic/index.shtml
(Academic Departments) http://students.vcccd.net/scheds.htm
(Schedule of Classes) http://www.venturacollege.edu/college_information/directory/faculty_ftpt_email.shtml
(Faculty email list) |
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Biography: Welcome to my website! I started teaching English Composition at a
community college in 1995 in my home town (in Both my parents were
teachers, my father a professor of geography at the University of Windsor and
my mother a high school math teacher (a true genius, I’ve always thought):
she was able to work on her first M.A. in music while pregnant with my sister
in 1963 and her second M.A. in math education while pregnant with me in
1973. Somewhere in between these grand
ambitions of giving birth to theses and babies, my brother was born. My fondest memories involve
curling up on the sofa next to my father and watching him grade, offering him
my 7-year-old comments as replacements for his own on student papers. Pretending to be a professor at such an
early age was completely pretentious, I know, but I loved placing false
(actually, pipe-cleaner!) glasses at the tip of my nose and sifting through
the papers my father had already graded.
It is no surprise, I guess, that I chose the life of a scholar and teacher. Believe it or not, I
actually decided to do a PhD in English Literature in the third grade (I’m
intending to be provocative here, so please bear with me as you roll your
eyes!), and not because I knew this field to be my strength but because my
grade three teacher -- whose name I shall not utter -- called me a “slow
reader.” I stuttered, you see, and
especially at moments when called upon to read in front of a sea of all-white
faces. The day I was called “slow” was
the day we were reading Rudyard Kipling’s “Rikki Tikki Tavi” (I later did my
1998 M.A. thesis on Rudyard Kipling’s and Hollywood’s Kim, so you see how disturbingly powerful revenge can be for a
soul like mine!). I ran home that very
evening and asked my mother, “How far can a person go in reading?” “I suppose a PhD in English
Literature,” my mother said (what a dangerous nonchalance) and continued to
knead healthy versions of aloo parathas
for that night’s dinner, a pile of Calculus exams waiting for her on the
kitchen table. We’d be eating in the
dining room that night. “Then, I’ll show her!” I said, spiteful child that I
was. Attempts were made to discourage
me from choosing this destiny (after all, my two siblings were on their way
to Since then, I’ve published
my work, taught courses in a number of fields and disciplines, taken
interdisciplinary graduate seminars, trained T.A.s (Teaching Assistants) in
the Writing Program at UCSB, presented papers at conferences, helped
professors edit their book manuscripts, and organized various panels,
including one in the area of Consumer Culture at a major international
conference in Cultural Studies.
Cultural Studies has also been one of my main fields of interest
throughout my graduate career, and I have had the chance of working closely
with leading scholars in this area in both the My dissertation focuses on
contemporary British and Postcolonial literature. More specifically, I examine the responses
of British and South Asian writers and artists to the commercial genre of
Empire revivalism in television and film during the 1980s. I argue that a number of writers and artists
re-appropriated the blackness they had discursively come to embody as
laborers in postcolonial My motivation at present is
the challenge of keeping struggling students interested in acquiring
successful study skills, flexibility in their use of strategies while
reading, fluency in writing Standard English, and a better understanding of
grammar, syntax, and appropriate social roles in college. There is something thrilling about that
juggling act because I know that my strengths necessarily must surface if I am to have an
impact. I know from experience how
hard a scholastic life can be, especially when one feels “out of place” or
alienated by one’s circumstances.
Here’s a tip to all my students: if you’re not panicking just a tad
bit, you’re not doing it right. Let
the panic fuel you so that you can get even further than you had originally
expected, and trust me when I say that the panic slowly melts away once you
start achieving great things. I didn’t
get this dream job by waiting at home.
I drove over two thousand miles away from “home” to find it! |
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Syllabi and Some Assignments for my current students: Courses I have taught at |
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Links to some of the courses I have taught at UCSB: http://www.english.ucsb.edu/people-detail.asp?PersonID=134 |
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Links to Conference Papers: http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/archive/2004-03/0094.htm http://www.english.ucsb.edu/events-detail.asp?EventID=299 http://www.keeline.com/PCA2004/04-09-Friday.html http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/info/organization.html http://acc.english.ucsb.edu/conference/grad_2005/Program.pdf http://acc.english.ucsb.edu/conference/grad2005/schedule.asp |
