Faculty profile: Rebecca Ballard, assistant professor for the English-Literature, Media, and Culture Program

By Katherine Grubb

Throughout her academic career, English Assistant Professor Rebecca Ballard has made a series of significant moves—cross-country, and even cross-continental—with her latest being to Tallahassee, Florida.

Nearly 20 years ago, she moved from her hometown of Sonoma, California, to New York City, where she studied English at Columbia University, earning her bachelor’s degree in 2010, graduating magna cum laude and with departmental honors. Ballard then earned her master’s and doctorate at Duke University, graduating in 2016. She also spent one year, 2014-15, as a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

Since completing her undergraduate and graduate instruction, Ballard has spent time teaching English as an assistant professor at higher education institutions in North Carolina and Texas.

Now, she is a faculty member at Florida State, having arrived in the fall of 2023, and she is settling into the various roles she has in the English department. In some ways, her move to FSU has been familiar for her. Both Columbia and Duke have campus cultures similar to FSU’s.

As Ballard discusses her current teaching environment, she speaks eagerly of how the department’s class sizes cultivate a form of intimacy. She smiles, reflecting on the mentorship and rapport—with both graduate and undergraduate students—that she has already formed in her time here.

“It is lovely to be at a campus that has so many resources—so much breadth and depth—but to still have the ability to have sustained relationships with students,” Ballard says.

Prior to her arrival here, Ballard spent three years at a private liberal arts college where she had the chance to instruct many students in multiple classes during her three years there. Ballard thinks that student-professor connections become especially strong when they span multiple semesters’ coursework.

“I really enjoyed the chance to form sustained intellectual relationships with students over the course of their academic careers,” Ballard says.

Several of these students were able to work for her as research assistants or collaborators on projects pertaining to the classes they had taken.

During the Spring 2024 semester, she is teaching a graduate seminar on the contemporary novel Anthropocene. Ballard looks forward to working with several of these students as a major professor or committee member in the years to come.

In addition to lecturing, Ballard is currently working with English-Literature, Media, and Culture graduate student Pablo Ramon-Rivera on his committee. Ramon-Rivera’s work studies Puerto Rican literary and cultural contributions post-Hurricane Maria, and Ballard’s perspective has been instrumental in adding new directions to the scope of the project.

“Working with Dr. Ballard has allowed me to effectively connect postcolonial ideas and theories with those pertaining to schools of ecocriticism, especially environmental disasters and environmental violence,” Ramon-Rivera says. “Her expertise and professionalism have been invaluable to me at this stage of my career.”

Through her enthusiastic support and considerate feedback, Ballard has helped him feel more confident in himself and his research.

I believe Dr. Ballard's mentorship has helped me not only from a research perspective but also a personal one. I’m extremely grateful and very lucky to be working with her.

— Pablo Ramon-Rivera

“I believe her mentorship has helped me not only from a research perspective but also a personal one,” he adds. “I’m extremely grateful and very lucky to be working with her.”

Ballard conducts her own research, too. On her department faculty page bio, Ballard describes her interest in exploring “how the political and the literary inform each other in the contemporary world, tracing both how social movements take narrative shape and how fiction responds to issues of social justice.”

Her current project is an extension of the dissertation she completed at Duke University. In the simplest terms, the research explores how “structural and environmental understandings of violence” from the postmodern era impact works of fiction written in the 1970s onward– especially those authored by minoritized writers. The project traces how such authors employ speculative genres to address representational challenges.

“The book is really making the case that genre is a kind of technology by which novels participate in social movement conversations,” Ballard adds. She hopes to finish the manuscript this year.

Since moving to Tallahassee, Ballard says she has been enjoying northern Florida for its biodiversity and its submersion in the cultural phenomena she often studies. She never really imagined spending so much of her academic career in the Southeast U.S.

Her work, she explains, has been “indelibly shaped by the places she has lived” after moving from New York to Durham, North Carolina.

“The version of environmental politics that I try to study and amplify does not have its roots in the white, upper-middle class environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s,” she says. “It has its roots in southern black organizing– so living in these places has been really formative for the way that I've been learning to think about these issues over the last decade.”

Duke is located only an hour from Warren County, where the country’s first environmental justice protests took place in the early 1980s.

While in the process of earning her doctorate at Duke, Ballard briefly lived in Honolulu, where she continued her research at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. This period, Ballard says, marked a positive shift in her scholarly thinking. 

“There, I began to learn more about what indigenous sovereignty looked like in relation to environmental work there,” she says. “Really, it complicated the Western ideas about nature that I had sort of absorbed unwittingly.”

Her experiences in Hawai’i and the South have shaped the evolution of her academic interests, whose roots can be traced back to her time at Columbia University.

Ballard moved from small town Northern California to New York City because she had an acute interest in journalism. Several years into her undergraduate program, she gained an internship at The New Yorker. Her editorial responsibilities involved calling some of her favorite writers and asking for their notes on these big, important projects.

However, her preference for spending more time with academic literature surprised Ballard.

“I was finding myself eager to leave that beautiful shiny building”—then located in the heart of Times Square—“and go back to my college library to finish the research that I was doing for my academic seminars,” she says.

Her affection for storytelling endured, even though it spun her away from what she thought was her dream job at The New Yorker toward a career in academia, a future she had never considered. That world existed far outside of the one in which she grew up.

“I wanted to stay in New York, and I had the chance to, but I knew from my campus visits to Duke that I needed to be there,” Ballard says, “because of the people who were there and the way that program was set up.”

Ballard moved to Durham, where she earned her doctorate in English in 2016. After graduating, she continued her research and began teaching at Winston-Salem State University, an hour east of her graduate alma mater.

In 2020, she relocated to Austin, Texas, a 30 to 45-minute commute to Southwestern University in Georgetown, where she taught until her move to Florida.

Though her initial pull toward journalism was rerouted, her fundamental curiosity has propelled Ballard through her professional ventures. She describes her role as “an anthropologist of literary form.”

“If you wait for the world to tell you what things are supposed to be connected,” she says, “you might not notice the things that actually are.”

Ballard moved to FSU with her husband, Andrew. He is an assistant professor of political science in the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy.

Prior to their relocation, the two were working at different universities, separated by a day’s worth of travel. Ballard speaks warmly of their new life in Tallahassee. The two have made a home of their place in the Midtown area with their two poodle-mixes.

The neighborhood’s centrality, its walkability and robust community remind Ballard of her time in New York.

“Despite being much smaller than Austin, Tallahassee has actually offered me more of that feeling that I've missed so much of city life,” she adds.

She spends her mornings walking her dogs from home to one of Midtown’s staple cafes—Ology Brewing, RedEye, Hawthorn Bistro and Bakery, or Lucky Goat—where she’ll sit and write for several hours.

Ballard looks forward to establishing stronger roots in Tallahassee, contributing to the abundant spirit of the University, and interacting with the larger culture of Florida. As she soaks in the state’s rich history, she can apply these encounters to the direction of her research.

Katherine Grubb is an English-Editing, Writing, and Media major, with a minor in communication. She graduates from FSU in May.

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