Flexibility

by Roberto Tejada

Before I came to UB for my graduate work, I had been living in Texas and working as a curator at Southwest Texas State University. I had been flirting with the idea of going back to graduate school for quite a while, even during a time when I lived in Mexico for ten years.

On one of my visits here to Buffalo, visiting my family, Ben Friedlander suggested that I apply to UB. Before that, I was only thinking of applying to art history departments. Ben was in the English department, and he said that I could probably do the kind of interdisciplinary work at UB that would involve visual and critical studies.

After applying, I got a call from the department chair, Barbara Bono, saying they were offering me the department's Doubrava scholarship, in addition to the university-wide Schomberg Fellowship. I accepted. I really couldn't say no. That support has allowed me to dedicate myself to my graduate studies without giving up my professional contacts. I still am asked to participate as a consultant in curatorial projects, particularly over the summers.

It's really worked out. Courses offered here completely coincide with my interests, and conferences held at UB have addressed my concerns. For example, there was a Ronald Johnson mini-conference that doctoral candidate Joel Bettridge organized in 2000.

Ronald Johnson was a modernist-slash-postmodernist poet who lived in San Francisco for many years. He wrote a long poem called "Ark," which I had helped to translate into Spanish for an anthology that came out in 1992. I was involved in reviewing some of the difficulties in these modernist texts with translators in Mexico. Ronald Johnson was also one of the first poets to whom I ever wrote to ask about submitting material for the magazine Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, which I initially put together at NYU around 1986 and which I continue to edit today.

The flexibility of the English department has been important to me. It wants to be an umbrella to different programs, to different centers. This has helped me to address a variety of professional interests.