Q&A: Margaret McFadden, Associate Professor of American Studies

Jenny Chen ’12 was new to Colby, but it didn’t take her long to notice that students sign up in droves for Margaret McFadden’s classes. She wanted to know why. The two talked about pop culture, studying images, and how being a park ranger is like teaching.

How long have you been at Colby?
I came to Colby twelve years ago, and I was the first person to have an official job in American studies. … It was very exciting.

How has the American Studies Program grown since you arrived?
We really now think about American studies more as America in relationship to the rest of the world … whether that’s in terms of empire, in terms of economic leadership, in terms of people moving around the world—immigration and migration. You have to think about that, and how other people in other countries think about us, as opposed to just how we think
about ourselves.

So how does that affect the way you teach?
We’re moving in the direction of much more visual work, more work on visual culture. We have a fantastic art museum, a really, really great collection of American art, and so we are trying to build our connections to the art museum.

Visual culture includes film, right?
We’re actually in the process of hiring our first film studies professor. … We’re hoping [to] start a film studies program too. [That position] will live in the American Studies Program at least administratively, but we’re hoping that it will be much broader—that it will be global. Obviously Hollywood is a part of that, but it’s not the whole story.

Being born and raised in New York City, what is it like to live in Maine?
I love living in Maine—I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Maine is different. It’s not like anywhere else I’ve ever lived, and I’ve lived in a bunch of different places. I think it has a unique culture that is a little bit outside the mainstream of American culture in ways that feel really comfortable to me. I actually taught a course about Maine once because I got so sick of students [who] didn’t understand how interesting Maine was and had a very L.L.Bean version of Maine.

What has been your favorite class to teach?
Oh boy, that’s so hard!

Well then what is one of your favorite classes?
I love teaching my pop culture classes. Part of the fun for me is students start to think analytically and critically about things that they took … as entertainment, and as benign, and as trivial. People start to see that we are all shaped by a set of ideas about gender, about sexuality, about class, about what’s normal, about what’s natural. Those things completely affect not only who we are as people but also what we think about other people. I like those classes because there is not a right answer, and I’m always learning things from students and they’re always learning from each other. 

What do you like best about Colby students?
This might sound a little weird but what I really like is that Colby students work hard and are earnest and are curious about learning in a way that’s not hyper competitive. I really like that. People work together, and they don’t want to crush everyone else. They don’t necessarily want their success to come at anyone’s expense. I think that changes the dynamic a lot.

Did you plan on being a teacher?
My mom’s a teacher, and so it felt kind of natural to me. It’s like a family business. I wasn’t necessarily going to go into teaching but, when I was working as a park ranger, part of what we were doing was giving these tours about these historical buildings. We were doing research and writing the tours and … at a certain point I realized, ‘Oh, this is teaching.’ And I found that I really enjoyed that.

Park ranger?
I was not an American studies major in college. I actually don’t think I took a single course about American history in college. I was a philosophy major, so I’ve come very far from where I started out. My specialty was medieval philosophy. But, you know, the thing is, opportunities appear, and if you follow certain opportunities they lead in certain directions.

And what opportunities led you to American studies?
Well, I was also a women’s studies minor, and I got a summer job working in Central Falls, New York, at a place called Women’s Rights National Historical Park. I ended up working there for five years, and I had to learn a lot about American women’s history. I became very interested in that and went off to grad school to work in that. It’s one of those things that your interests expose you to if you follow what really grabs you—your passions.

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