Episode 128 - Emily Lynn Osborn: "Not to pin your passion onto only one pathway."

Associate Professor Emily Lynn Osborn from the Department of History talks about how studying African History merged with her sense of rebellion with the French language and interest in history. Opportunities that brought her abroad made her see the world differently, and these experiences transferred to her role at UChicago as she spearheaded the Study Abroad Civilization program in Senegal. Tune in to hear more about her thoughts on UChicago's educational mission, her research inspirations, and being on a reality TV show. 

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Emily Lynn Osborn of the University of Chicago Department of History. Professor Osborn is an Associate Professor of African history, African studies, and the College. She's here today to tell us about her lifelong connection to West Africa, her research on the region, her appearance on International House Hunters, and how she became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Osborn, welcome to The Course. It's great to see you. How are you this morning? 

Emily Lynn Osborn 00:30
Hi Stephen, and please call me Emily. I am fine. It's a beautiful day here in Chicago. 

Stephen 00:35
Glad to hear it and thank you. If you could please at the top here tell us your position or, you know, positions at the university and just a little bit in layman's terms, like what those titles actually mean. 

Emily Lynn Osborn 00:50
I'm an associate professor in the Department of History, and I am also a Deputy Dean in the college, and I am the deputy dean of the Office of Research and Teaching Innovation. 

I'm a professor and I came to that through my PhD and came into this world of academia by being a historian. And I'm a historian of Francophone West Africa. In that capacity, I conduct research, and I teach, and I teach undergraduates, and I also train graduate students, some of whom go on themselves to become scholars of Africa, and others who go on to become historians and scholars and anthropologists of other parts of the world. 

Also in my work as a historian, as an Africanist, also in my role as a professor, I've helped to bring into being our Senegal Civ Program, and that is a study abroad program for our undergraduates. 

Now, in recent years, I've spent a lot of time in my other role, which is as deputy dean in the college, and that's the undergraduate college. And I have a unit that has several offices in it, and we are dedicated to reinforcing, extending, and transforming liberal arts learning, and that is core to the mission of our undergraduate education here. That's really enjoyable and it can be also really challenging. 

Stephen 02:18
When you were a kid, I mean, you know, like maybe middle or high school age, what did you imagine yourself doing? Did you think you would be a historian of Francophone West Africa when you were like a teenager?

Emily Lynn Osborn 02:31
No, I did not. When I was growing up, my mother always encouraged me to consider becoming a lawyer because I like to argue so much. And in some ways I feel like being a historian entails and deploys some of those skills that my mother really identified early on. 

Growing up, I really loved to read. I did love to talk and to think and to sort of consider things from different angles and perspectives and to engage with people.

And those are all things that in one way or another are fundamental to my intellectual and academic work today. I've had long standing interest in history, and I remember once I had the opportunity to go with my mother to England when I was very young, and we visited these graveyards, and I was always so fascinated by looking at these gravestones and people who lived so long ago, and that was something growing up in the Midwest, we are not, you know, the history, the deep history of the place is not nearly as evident.

The landscape isn't marked in the same way. That's not to say there isn't deep history there. There is. But going to England and visiting castles was really a way to think more deeply about the past and that sort of sparked me.

And I think I was about seven years old when that happened. And so I always had this sort of historical inclination and then I also had the opportunity to, we had connections with West Africa. My brother was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and ultimately I was able to spend some time there in high school, and I was able to sort of merge these interests in the deep past and historical change. in Africa and in the francophone world together.

Stephen 04:20
 Was that something that you were planning as you were in college? Like, I mean, as you were applying to college, as you were in college was that what yeah. So you're shaking your head. 

Emily 04:36
No. I'm shaking my head. No, not really. I mean, I think I went into college assuming that I would be a history major. I did try political science for a while and I found it… I kept wondering where the individuals were and where the people were. And maybe that was the virtue of these particular or the nature of these particular political science classes that I took. But I kept, in a sense, returning to history and to the historical discipline. 

The other dimension of this is that in my family, there was a great emphasis on learning French. My father was a great Francophile who ultimately spent two years in Strasbourg, in France. Before I was born, with my older brothers and it was just a given and expected that you learned French and I did that with some resistance and in a sense part of my commitment to the language, but also my interest in forging a different path, was that I decided I would polish my French and spend time in a francophone country, but not in France itself.

I had a high school exchange to Côte d'Ivoire when I was in high school. And then I spent a year studying abroad in college, at Université, in my junior year, and that was another really important formative year. And actually one of the best friends that I have, who's visiting this summer in Chicago is someone I met while studying abroad in Senegal when I was an undergraduate. That's part of the reason too, that I'm so committed to the study abroad program for undergraduates because it ended up being so formative in my own life.

Stephen 06:17
Yeah, I wanted to ask more about your own study abroad experience. I mean, what was that program and what do you think the benefits that you came away with were after doing a year there? 

Emily Lynn Osborn 06:26
It was a tremendous experience. We enrolled in the university. We were not given housing at the university because as with many West African universities, the housing crunch for their for their own students. So for Senegalese students is very serious. And so they do not open up housing. I mean, to this day, to students from Europe or the United or the Americas. 

So I lived in a communal house. I took classes at the university. I also learned some Wolof in a formal language class, but Wolof is the language of the street. It's the language of getting around Dakar and good parts of Senegal. I think part of what it taught me is just a different way of life, a different world, but also fundamental commonalities.

I mean, there are differences between me and young Senegalese who I met, different normative expectations, different cultural practices, but then also some great commonalities.

So I think that coming to know those and not making assumptions as sort of curiosity and humility, which are two qualities and values that I think are greatly important. I think I came to learn and live by those in a way that stuck with me. 

Stephen 07:49
Was that the moment when you decided to pursue this at the graduate level, or was there a moment, or how did that journey like unfold? 

Emily Lynn Osborn 07:57
I wrote an undergraduate BA thesis. And I enjoyed doing that quite a bit. It entailed independent research, as BA theses do. And I toyed with the idea of going to graduate school, but I didn't pursue it at that particular moment. And I was out in California, and I had a friend in San Francisco, and we decided to get an apartment together, and I needed to get a job.

And so that's what I did and I worked as a political consultant for which is sort of a glamorous term for getting out the vote and mobilizing. There's lots of ballot initiatives in California, and so I worked on a number of those. 

And I was pretty good at it, but I couldn't stand the work. So that was, you know, I think there is worth, when undergraduates want to go straight to graduate school, I actually think it's quite worthwhile for them to take a year or two or more out. It's clarifying. And for me it was clarifying that I really recognized I wanted to move in the realm of ideas and debates, and learning. 

And so that's what took me back to graduate school. And at that point, it was very difficult to get an academic position, but I got a fellowship and I just approached graduate school with the idea that I would undertake this opportunity and utilize this fellowship. And at the other end, I would, might have to figure out what else to do. 

Stephen 09:29
That's daunting. 

Emily Lynn Osborn 09:32
 Yeah, but it's, I think it's also, I think it's sort of liberating in a way because you're not setting yourself on a particular path.

But by the time that I was then finishing my PhD, the academic job market had changed. And I was able to, I got a postdoc and then my first tenure track position the next year after that.

Stephen 09:53
 Who were some of the people, I mean, especially during that time, but also just kind of when you look at your academic journey as a whole, like who are some of the people who you would say were most like influential or important to you? 

Emily Lynn Osborn 10:04
I mean, I can't talk about my life and my growth and my development without thinking of my mother. She was a force of nature and a tremendously supportive human being who could also not hold back on saying something critical if it was merited.

When I was in college, she read, when I had a long paper, she would read it and give me some feedback on it and she would tell me if she couldn't understand what I was saying.

Stephen 10:34
That's valuable. That's really valuable.

Emily Lynn Osborm 10:35
It was, I mean, in a sense, she helped me really learn how to write. So that's really important. 

And then Richard Roberts, who is my advisor at Stanford University, was a tremendous advisor. He's someone who set the bar and the expectations quite high, but he also provided the support and the encouragement and the resources and the tools to achieve those expectations.

And I've since learned in part because of my work with the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning, that that sort of dynamicis is really important to effective pedagogy and mentorship. So without even, you know, I don't think he ever studied that as a way of going about doing it. It's also a good way to relate to human beings.

But, you know, here are the expectations and here are the ways I can help you and ensure that you can reach them. So he was really a model in helping me along. And he was also a model in that he really fostered a community of scholars. who were interested in studying the African continent. So he brought in students who studied different parts of the continent. He fostered a community of people who came together. We had a whole sort of practice of intergenerational discussion and sharing, preparing for oral exams, preparing, writing the dissertation. So it was really in a sense working on the PhD was really a communal endeavor. 

And that network and that community, you know, seeded other relationships across the field, across different universities, across the world, that is really, quite supportive and encouraging and challenging too. As it should be.

I did not encounter graduate school as a competitive environment. It was one with high expectations, and it was one where of striving, but it was not cutthroat competition. 

Stephen 12:47
Yeah, I wanted to ask about some of your administrative responsibilities, ‘cause I mean, it seems like you have taken on a lot outside of your own research or outside of the classroom, and I do want to get to those things also, but yeah, I mean, like, can you just tell me a little bit about the administrative positions you're in and like what that work actually entails?

Emily Lynn Osborn 13:08
I think there are two key components of administrative work as I know it. And one is that I believe in this institution. I believe in the educational mission of the University of Chicago. I deeply appreciate its intellectual orientation, its commitment to ideas, its commitment to debate. Are we perfect in achieving this mission?

Not at all. Is there work to be done? Of course. But fundamentally I do believe strongly in who we are and what we do at this university. So that's a starting point.

The second point is that administrative work in all its forms really is about service. It's about serving the institution, be it a committee in a department, be it the department, be it, the deputy dean work that I do. 

Before becoming deputy dean, I also served during COVID as interim dean of the Graham School, and that is our school at the University of Chicago dedicated to lifelong learning. And I came to deeply appreciate the mission of that school and its work with adult learners. It's work with people who have followed different educational pathways and then want to come back to have in a sense, a classical kind of core education.

Graham School is a place that really throws open the doors of the university to lots of different people. I think that's a wonderful mission and a wonderful component of this institution.

In my current work with the college, I also serve the mission, but I do it in a way that focuses a bit more squarely on undergraduate education. So I'm interested in how can we serve the mission of undergraduate education better in all sorts of ways.

One thing that I've become very interested in is the Core. So our undergraduate students spend almost two years of their life, two years of their academic life fulfilling the requirements of the Core. The Core has dimensions that are in the social sciences, the humanities, the physical sciences, the biological sciences. 

What do these Cores do and achieve? How do they intersect with one another? So I've convened all sorts of core conversations, working very closely with a colleague of mine, Jennifer Spruill, and we bring together people who teach in the core from across these different realms to talk about the core and what are their aims.

And it is amazing both to learn about how biological sciences goes about this and the particularities of that, but also the fundamental commonalities in approach and in thinking and in analysis that you can find with the humanities core and with the social sciences core. 

So I see my administrative work in ORDI, which is the Office of Research and Teaching Innovations, as helping to spur and advance that kind of discussion, which I think really helps to spur and advance and enhance our work with undergraduates.

Stephen 16:26
I do also just want to ask about your research and what you're teaching. So like, I'm curious if there's anything specific right now that is really grabbing your attention or, just like what in in your field is interesting to you at the moment. 

Emily Lynn Osborn 16:43
Well, at the time being, I'll just talk briefly. I attended a workshop in Munich this past spring, and I presented a paper there on a longstanding project I have had on a back burner, and that's about an effort that took place in the 1950s and 1960s by the U.S. government to help countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia to build basically what are agricultural land grant universities. So there was an effort to export the model of the land grant university to different parts of the world. And one of the universities that was active in that project was the University of Illinois, which is where I grew up, and they helped to found Inshallah University in Sierra Leone.

So I have spent time in the archives at the University of Illinois, hazing through these amazing documents and photograph albums of these projects that took, you know, agronomists and various personals, professors, faculty members from the University of Illinois to Sierra Leone. And that also brought Sierra Leonians to the University of Illinois. And this happened in Michigan State had projects, Oklahoma State had projects in Ethiopia, Michigan State had many, but one important one was in Nigeria. 

Stephen 18:02
Wow. What was the impetus for that? I’ve, obviously, I've never heard of this program.

Emily Lynn Osborn 18:07
I mean, many people put it in the context of the Cold War, so that it was, this is Cold War competition and an effort to help various countries increase their agricultural output so that they could feed themselves. I mean, there was this idea that democracy could not be successful if it was not rooted in stability and prosperity. I think that there was also, I mean, I know there was a lot of excitement around independence and these countries becoming Sierra Leone, for example, gaining its independence it was quite symbolically powerful in a sense to open a new modern university which stood in contrast. In Sierra Leone in particular, you had Four Bay College, which was, traits of its origins to 1827. It's the oldest institution of higher education in Sub Saharan Africa. But it's, you know, at the time of independence was terribly British in its orientation.

 I mean, they taught Latin and so there was something quite inspiring to have this practical, modern university that stood in contrast to that curriculum and that really elite orientation that people from the rural areas, people who were the sons of chiefs, people who were sons of farmers could come to this university and learn to be better agricultural producers. 

Stephen 19:33
I have to ask before we started recording, you mentioned a reality TV experience. I just have to, had to briefly ask you what that experience was?

Emily Lynn Osborn 19:45
Well, when we launched the Senegal Civ program in 2018, I thought it was a good idea for me to be there for that whole quarter and then I had a quarter of leave. So I decided with my partner that I would go to Senegal and I would take my three children, take our three children. And Steve unfortunately had to stay back because he has a regular job, but he came and visited.

And so I went to Senegal and put my kids in Senegalese schools and ran the study abroad program and taught in it. And then we stayed on. And in the midst of that, my eldest son had become, when we would visit my parents, He started watching HGTV and so there's something called International House Hunters.

And so you put in an application and they basically tell you, you won't be taken. Bryce really wanted to do that. Someone suggested it. And so I put in the application and then I told, and I said to him, Okay, I'll put in the application, but then you have to accept we are going to Senegal. Because he was very resistant.  And he was eight years old at the time. 

And so I put in the application and ultimately they called us and they came And, visited and they filmed and we made actually House Hunters history because normally your partner who you go through this reality show has to be 18 or over and my partner was Bryce who was eight years old so they had to get a sort of legal dispensation for him to be my partner, but there is a House Hunters International episode about our family in Senegal. It was hilarious. 

Cause it's not really a reality show. It's a reenactment. So they had movers come into our house and move the furniture out and we looked at it empty and then they moved it back in and then we looked and that was three months later. 

Stephen 21:35
So they move everything. for the cameras and then it gets moved separately. 

Emily Lynn Osborn 21:39
In our case, yeah, they moved them. They, they don't always do it this way, but they did for us. They moved all the furniture out. We looked at it empty. And then they moved it all back in and then that afternoon they filmed three months later.

Stephen 21:52
Right. I did want to ask like, what advice you would give to someone considering going down a similar path?

Emily Lynn-Osborn 22:00
I think it's important to strike a balance between pursuing your passion, which I think is really fundamentally important. That you need to do something that you like and that you care about. But I think that it's important not to pin your passion onto only one pathway, that there are ways in which, I mean, when I went off to the field and I spent nearly two years conducting field research in Guinea Conakry, when I was in graduate school, and then since then I've spent lots of time in Guinea Conakry and in Senegal.

And so there's a way in which that set me up for the pathway that I ultimately pursued. But there's also ways in which that work, that historical work, that linguistic work, that living in these different countries, gave me skills that I could have applied to other types of jobs and other careers and other pathways. 

And I, so I encourage people to both identify their passion and what they care about, but to also abstract from that passion what they know, their skills, so that they can apply it to other things. 

So I could have gone into NGO work. I could have done, you know, other sort of governmental or non governmental work with where I was and what I did. And so I, just don't want graduate students or people to get so pinned in and so narrowly focused on what is possible with their passion that they can't understand how it can apply. 

Someone who writes a PhD in history has a lot of skills and a lot of capacity, but they need to be able to recognize that and articulate that and make a case for it, should circumstances allow it. present themselves that they need to do that, or that they have the opportunity to do that.

By way of example, I didn't really consider myself as having had a tremendous amount of leadership experience. When I became interim dean of the Graham School, but I realized in a lot of my work there, and since then that I drew upon my experiences teaching and someone did once say to me, oh, you know, I've leadership experience because I teach and I never thought about that.

But of course, when you're leading a class. That is a practice in leadership. And you have all sorts of challenges and opportunities. And so, and I draw on my classroom experience on my relationship to feedback on my relationship to community on my relationship to encouraging people giving feedback all the time in my, in all sorts of realms of my life.

Stephen 24:38
My last question for you, before we wrap is just what do you find most fulfilling about what you do at UChicago? 

Emily Lynn Osborn 24:46
I feel like it's so cliché to say but every day is different every day is different in terms of who I work with and what I'm working on. And then when I get back to my own research, I'm reminded about why this is why I really came to this. So that's those moments and those hours are also really important. 

I also think that I work with a lot of really terrific people who, who share a common sense of serving this university and in our own small way, trying to make it a better place.

Stephen 25:21
Thank you, Emily, for your time today, and course takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu, or the University's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.