It’s no secret that the new faculty experience in higher education is rather fraught. Mounting pressures for professional publication, navigating the tricky waters of fluctuating publisher resources, ballooning service requirements, and limited departmental resources can all leave a new faculty member struggling with imposter syndrome at best, and floundering in silence while attempting develop effective classroom strategies at worst.

Discover a range of flexible, immediately actionable projects, assignments, and curriculum structures in Swamped: Interdisciplinary Teaching Approaches for New Faculty. These battle-tested strategies have been carefully organized to provide new instructors with the space to adapt, modify, or reuse this material to fit any academic context or need. Developed by experienced faculty from the University of Indiana East, the goal is to share and disseminate these tools and experiences as widely as possible so that others might use them, make them better, and share them further. 

The authors and editor intend for these projects, assignments, and processes to create freedom and academic space for new faculty members to work on their vital research, focus on innovative service opportunities, and help mitigate teaching fears and uncertainties that often accompany the transition from graduate student to professor. 

Justin M. Carroll is an associate professor of American History at Indiana University East. He earned his Ph.D. at Michigan State University and wrote his dissertation under the directory of Dr. Susan Sleeper-Smith. His research interests include the British Empire, the early American Republic, the Great Lakes, Native Americans, and Sequential Art and Comics. His first book, The Merchant John Askin: Furs and Empire at British Michilimackinac, was a finalist for The Midwestern Book Prize, and he is currently working on a graphic history of an Ojibwe woman named Tshusick and her journey to Washington D.C. in the 1820s. He has an excellent partner and son and a cat named Pei Mei.