Henry James, Affect and the Writer/Researcher in the Academy

In this paper I am going to examine the role of the fiction writer/academic in university writing programs, especially the way in which they wear numerous research hats. Multi-skilled in every sense of the word, they range over university research restlessly - research for a novel one day, pedagogical research the next, time snatched, if they’re lucky, to pursue their ‘formal’ research projects, to apply for funding not just from the ARC but from the Literature Board and other community funds available to writers. They find the time to give conference papers and meet other researchers in their fields. While researchers in other disciplines such as science might say this is how it is in the academy today, especially in relation to expected research outcomes, the researcher in a writing program, I would argue, often enters research in a more complex and diverse manner, doffing one hat to replace it with another - sometimes deliberately crossing over into different research styles and genres, sometimes forgetting which hat they’re actually wearing.