Meet Ami Mattison, Visiting Women's Studies Professor

By Liz MacDonald '04

Southern performance poet Ami Mattison had already visited Antioch twice when she learned that the Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies position was available. She'd made the trek up from her hometown of 17 years, Atlanta, GA, to perform her poetry and lead writing workshops on campus. "On both of those occasions I was impressed with Antioch and really enjoyed the environment and culture. I was very happy to have the chance to be here as a teacher," she says. "I had a sense that Antioch students were intelligent and hardworking before I came and the majority of students have met that expectation."

One thing Mattison did not expect was the College's unique system of shared governance. She says, "I have been impressed with the involvement of the students in the culture of Antioch. I have been surprised by how many of the resources here are student-directed. Students take positions of leadership and are involved in what at a different university setting would be considered a higher level of institutional service - jobs and committees that would be primarily for faculty and administrators."

Mattison previously taught courses in Women's Studies and Queer Studies at Emory University and Georgia State University. She commented that Antioch students seem to enter college with greater familiarity with some of the concepts of feminist and queer theory that she teaches. "Those schools were very conventional. Since I was teaching queer studies and women's studies, I was getting students who were more liberal, but they were less familiar with ideas that were outside the norm or mainstream," says Mattison. "Many of them were open to those ideas, they just hadn't been introduced to them yet. It seems that Antioch students arrive here already familiar with ideas that are outside the norm."

Although Mattison enjoys teaching students at every level, the opportunity to work with more advanced students has been very enjoyable for her. "At the moment I am partial to a course that I'm teaching - Advanced Topics in Women's Studies. Half the students in the class are seniors so they tend to be a little more advanced. We're examining feminist poetry and prose and we are writing poetry and prose, and we perform as well. Basically we are looking at the relationship between creative writing and feminist theory and politics."

Feminist politics and queer theory have always been very connected to Mattison's writing and performance. "I have pretty diverse experience as a writer. I write poetry as well as fiction and creative non-fiction, and I also have done journalism. I was writing an op/ed column for a local magazine called "She's Out There." It was basically about queer politics and life from my perspective." Mattison also contributed feature articles and reviews to Atlanta newspapers and magazines.

Performance is Mattison's true passion. She often appears at festivals, conferences and spoken word events, as well as open mics in cafes or bars. "It's a very exciting way to make my writing and ideas accessible to people," she relates. "It provides a different route, besides publishing, to really get my writing out there."

Mattison holds a masters degree in Interdisciplinary Studies and is currently working on her doctoral dissertation in the same field. Her dissertation, entitled Peculiar Women, examines the figures of the mulatta and female invert in 20th Century social science texts and literature.

Her interdisciplinary background has helped inform Mattison's perspective on The Plan for Antioch College. "I think it's a really amazing and innovative plan to shift how Antioch delivers education. The idea of being able to combine science courses with other humanities or social science courses is really exciting. There have been limitations for me as an individual teacher to bring in that broad scope of knowledge. Because ultimately I am not a scientist, but the notion that one would be teaching with a scientist or a social scientist or someone from the arts or in a different humanities field makes for a very exciting course." Still, she finds many of the new concepts to be challenging. "It's just different enough from traditional ways of delivering courses so that at every turn I have these questions and it's clear to me that I am still embedded in these traditional structures for universities and colleges."

After completing her visiting professorship this summer, Mattison plans to go back to writing and performing full time. "Antioch's been a really great experience for me."