Public Lecture By Maria LaMonaca Wisdom (Director, Faculty Mentoring And Coaching Programs, Duke University) – What Can The Humanities Teach Us About Good Mentorship?

Drawing on material from her forthcoming book, How to Mentor a PhD, Dr. Maria LaMonaca Wisdom will discuss how humanistic inquiry might help us think about effective mentorship practices for both graduate students and junior faculty in the 21st-century university. Over the past few decades, higher education leaders have sounded alarm bells at a broken system of PhD advising across all disciplines in higher education. To date, scholars and leaders in STEM have taken the lead in writing reports, conducting research, and arguing for a vision of mentorship better aligned with the needs of today’s doctoral students and junior researchers. How can the humanities contribute to this conversation? What might be lost if we disengage from these conversations, both at our own campuses and on a national level? This talk is a part of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere’s Writing Retreat; however, you do not need to participate in the retreat to attend.

This event is free and open to the public.

Speaker Bio
Dr. Maria LaMonaca Wisdom is the Director of Faculty Mentoring and Coaching Programs at Duke University. In this role, she leads 1:1 and group coaching programs for faculty at all career stages from across the university. She offers consultations and workshops on mentoring (for both faculty and graduate students). She directs the Duke Peer Mentoring Program for First-Year PhD Students and the PhD Transitions Group Coaching Program for doctoral students. She writes on issues of coaching, mentorship, graduate education, and faculty development for the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is also at work on How to Mentor a PhD, now under contract with Princeton University Press.

Prior to her role at Duke, Dr. Maria LaMonaca Wisdom was executive director of a humanities center at UNC-Chapel Hill, a tenured English professor at Columbia College in South Carolina, and a scholar of Victorian women’s writing (Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home, 2008).