Approaching the one-year anniversary of her new position in the Honors College, Dr. Cassander Smith has had a blast and is excited to continue working and learning in such a fantastic place.
Dr. Cassander Smith was born and raised in Barnwell, South Carolina. A small southern town whose claim to fame is being the birthplace of the “Godfather of Soul,” James Brown, Barnwell is where Smith’s path to becoming an Associate Dean of The Honors College began. As the daughter of two plant workers who began their days at five o’clock each morning, Smith developed a strong work ethic and an appreciation for learning. From a young age, her parents emphasized getting a good education, recognizing it as the way to change her socioeconomic circumstances.
Instilled with her parents’ educational ideals, she excelled at math and was encouraged to pursue engineering throughout high school, and until her senior year English class, that’s what she was expected to study in college.
“Senior year in high school, I’m in this English course and I have this English teacher and I’m practicing creative writing and I realize I have this voice and then I’m like, ‘well, maybe I don’t want to be an engineer.’ So, then I go to college, and I major in journalism and then I encounter these journalism professors. So, at each step of the way different teachers and different kinds of mentoring kind of crafted my professional trajectory,” Smith said.
Dr. Cassander Smith being interviewed by Brett McCollum in her office in Honors Hall
After earning her Bachelor of Science in Newspaper Journalism from Florida A&M University, Smith went on to get a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing as well as her PhD in Early American Literature from Purdue University. During this time, she developed a great interest in early American literature and how people of different racial backgrounds encountered each other in early America, using former president Thomas Jefferson and author Phillis Wheatley as an example. Wheatley, born in West Africa and sold into slavery by the time she was eight, wrote the first book of poetry by an African American author to be published.
“When I teach about Thomas Jefferson, for example, I don’t just teach students about Jefferson. I also teach students about Phillis Wheatley and the relationship between Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley like what he thought about her poetry and whatnot because I always want to remind students that the way we get to where we are now is out of those various kinds of cultural interactions,” Smith said.
In 2010, she started work at the University of Alabama in the English department where she is an associate professor. One of the classes she most enjoys teaching is a departmental honors course called The Early American Survey,an introductory 200 level course designed for anybody wanting a general overview of early American literature.
“There’s so many myths that we operate under in the United States about the origins of the United States…and I just love teaching that class because it really challenges students to rethink what they think they know about the United States,” Smith said.
Dr. Cassander Smith in her Honors Hall office
Dr. Cassander Smith being interviewed by Brett McCollum
In 2010, she started work at the University of Alabama in the English department where she is an associate professor. One of the classes she most enjoys teaching is a departmental honors course called The Early American Survey,an introductory 200 level course designed for anybody wanting a general overview of early American literature.
“There’s so many myths that we operate under in the United States about the origins of the United States…and I just love teaching that class because it really challenges students to rethink what they think they know about the United States,” Smith said.
On May 16, 2021, Smith began work as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in The Honors College, an accomplishment she said is one of her proudest. This was a brand-new position created to support the Dean of The Honors College and to oversee the classroom experience. There was a big learning curve for Smith and her colleagues who needed to figure out how to best integrate the position into the structure of The Honors College. Through compartmentalizing tasks throughout the week and seeking advice from peers, Smith adjusted to and enjoyed this new chapter of her professional life. One of her first tasks in this new role was to define what makes an honors course, and identified a main point of emphasis on “transdisciplinarity.”
“That’s just a big fancy word for how we want students to be intellectually nimble, and what that means is asking big questions about things that you see in the world, and then being able to think about potential answers from various disciplinary vantage points,” she said.
“If you can pose a question and then think about how might someone in biology address this question, how might somebody in English address this question, how might an anthropologist address this question? When you come over to The Honors College, you get experience in thinking about intellectual questions from multiple disciplinary vantage points, and I think that is one of the signature differences of an Honors education,” Smith explained.
Going forward, Smith is looking to broaden the honors curriculum and to continue supporting faculty and students throughout their honors education.
