Kinohi Nishikawa
Doctoral Student, Literature
With a focus on twentieth-century African American print culture, Kinohi Nishikawa arrived at Duke’s Literature Program after graduating summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2001 with an A.B. in English. He currently teaches in the field of American literature and culture since the Civil War, with special emphases on the novel, popular culture, and American Studies. Originally from Honolulu, Hawaii, Kinohi hopes to secure a dissertation fellowship that will allow him to pursue archival work at an institution like New York City’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Upon completion of his degree, Kinohi will seek a teaching position at a research university or liberal arts college.
Kinohi encourages fellow graduate students to seek out a mentor early, even as soon as they begin their coursework. In his experience, great teachers often make great mentors, so the classroom presents a logical first point of contact. During two seminars with Assistant Professor of English, Matt Cohen, Kinohi found an ideal mentor for his needs. Nishikawa notes, “He made it a point to integrate discussion of course readings with the methodological particularities of my own research, even when those readings were only tangentially related to African American print culture.” Students, however, must continue to seek a professor’s expertise outside the classroom in order to cultivate a properly dialogic mentoring relationship in which mentor and student learn from each other and from each other’s work. For example, Kinohi has benefited from Cohen’s practice of forwarding relevant articles, chapters, and books to his colleagues whenever he comes across them in his work.
“A capstone moment in our mentoring relationship came last spring when Matt invited me to deliver two guest lectures on the likes of Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Oprah Winfrey to his advanced undergraduate history of the book seminar,” observes Nishikawa. The lectures afforded Kinohi the opportunity to put into practice what he learned from Cohen and to receive encouraging feedback and support in the process. Experiences like these have shaped Kinohi’s view that “a mentor is what might be called the ‘primary enabler’ of a student’s becoming professional within his or her discipline or field of study.” Good mentors stress to their students the precise labor of envisioning one’s teaching and scholarship as continuous works-in-progress and help their students best situate their research interests and career ambitions in the academic institutional matrix.
Along with pedagogy, Nishikawa cites “politics” and “the personal” as important components of faculty-student mentoring relationships. Mentors play a crucial political role in “helping a student understand the intellectual’s peculiar positioning in social relations—the ‘wider implications’ of one’s research, the ‘cultural value’ of one’s claims to knowledge.” Finally, mentors do their students a great personal service when they unveil “the very intimate, because individuated, stakes of one’s desire to become a professional within a particular disciplinary framework” by encouraging students to “interpret their research interests and intellectual investments as fundamental life choices.”
Matt Cohen
Assistant Professor, English
Kinohi is the kind of student that makes even an English teacher want to use platitudes to describe him. He’s always on time; he’s insightful; he’s always suggesting books to you to read. Just a couple of weeks ago I found a copy of Pidgin to da Max (a book of Hawaiian slang) in my box—a thoughtful gift following up a long conversation we’ve had about language, translation, and locality.
But this is to say that it is in the ways that he does not fit student-teacher dichotomies—either in his role as student or in his role as teacher, in my experience— that makes Kinohi so successful at both. Everyone is a potential intellectual partner for him; everyone (and I don’t just mean within the boundaries of Duke’s population) an interlocutor from whom interesting stuff is to be had if one asks the right questions. He’s certainly doing important scholarly work, in particular on the relationships between race and reading; but it is this ever-animated, unrestricted attitude of inquiry and engagement that makes Kinohi a joy to have as a colleague.
(This profile originally appeared in the Fall 2004 issue of The GRIND.)