Faculty Expert Series: Reading for Transformation

After completing a five-year agenda of presenting and publishing his research, Dr. Tony M. Vinci, Associate Professor of English at Ohio University Chillicothe, is looking forward to slowing down, taking a nap, and maybe spending some time with his cat, Poe. Since becoming a professor in 2014, Vinci has published and presented over 500 pages of original peer-reviewed scholarship in books and journals and at conferences around the globe. While focusing on the study of literature and culture, his scholarship engages topics as varied as the ethics of reading holocaust survivor testimony, racial traumas in fantasy and science fiction, and the experimental philosophies expressed by American women writers in the 1950s.

“It’s fun and exhausting, but it’s worth it,” he commented. “I’ve been teaching for 20 years, and I still get nervous before every class I teach. All the research—the endless reading and writing and revising—shows my students that I’m still a student, too.”

Vinci’s recent scholarship focuses on a few primary questions: “How might literature invite us to rethink our ethical obligations to others in pain? How might fantasy or science fiction help us become more vulnerable, more attentive to others? How might strange stories about nonhumans (ghosts, animals, androids, monsters, etc.) help us understand our own psychologies and our own cultures from new and surprising points of view?”

While all are distinctive topics, Vinci explained that there is a common theme in his work, which is that “we should read to be transformed. The person who enters a book should not be the same person who finishes it. All the weird stuff I study and teach is trying to change us; it’s trying to make us a little kinder, a little more open to otherness. Instead of being, literature asks us to become.”

“If I read a weird novel about different worlds, different species, humans falling in love with monsters, etc., then that should help me sustain curiosity about people who grew up poorer than I did or richer than I did; it should help me care more deeply about folks who think differently than I do or those who come from different cultural or social backgrounds than mine; it should make me ask new questions about the animals in my life and the millions and millions of lives with which I share the planet.”

Coming from a violent, hostile childhood in New York, Vinci explained that his background is very important in regard to his scholarship.

He revealed, “I’ve witnessed and experienced a great deal of abuse and sexual violence when I was a kid. Out of respect for my family, I try not to get too specific in print, but members of my family were sex trafficked at a very young age, and, well, that was just the beginning of our troubles. Needless to say, education was not important in my household. I didn’t really attend school. I didn’t read a book until I was 18 years old. I was completely uneducated as a young adult. I was never supposed to go to college let alone become an English professor. I was supposed to just work and make money. So, instead of going to school, I worked on a farm, I worked as a laborer for my brother’s mason business, I worked in a factory, I worked as a cook, I ran a convenient store, I taught guitar. My sister made my try college, and even then, I didn’t even apply until the Friday before classes began. I didn’t have the grades or the test scores or the money or the family connections or the status, but they let me in. I am so grateful for my college professors because, even though I didn’t have a clue how to think or study, they didn’t kick me out. They let me stay and kind of do my thing until I finally figured out how to be a student.”

Vinci explained that his past is part of what drives him. He commented, “I think about it all the time: Why did all that happen? Why were the women in my family treated as they were? Why did we all work so hard for so little? Why didn’t anyone at the school try to stop any of the abuse that was so obvious?”

He continued on to explain that the current sex trafficking problem in Chillicothe is one of the main reasons why he chose to teach here. He remarked, “I’m glad that I can bring my private experiences with this issue into the curriculum. I mean, let’s face it. You ask almost any of the women involved with sex trafficking in Chillicothe, and they’ll tell you that I look like the person who did it – a middle-class, white, polite, professional guy did this to them. So, I hope that it’s important and powerful to have a middle-class white guy like me help others read and think about stories of trauma and abuse, which are also stories of extraordinary acts of love and courage and belief and transformation.”

As an educator who teaches courses in English, cultural studies, philosophy, and film, Vinci claims that he needs to know this information. He remarked, “I need to understand these situations—the psychology of abuse, the social conditions that foster it, how different writers from different backgrounds address it imaginarily. More importantly, I need to know the counter-narratives, the stories that offer real alternatives to how one might think and live freely in the world. These counter-narratives offer folks who do not fit into our norms and assumptions a space to breathe, a way to not just rebel or sink deeply into despair but to live differently, to become-otherwise.”

Often in his scholarship, Vinci admits that he’s begging other authors and teachers, saying, “Please, don’t read a story of sexual abuse and analyze it like it’s any other story. Don’t read a story of genocide or intense domestic abuse and study it only for metaphor and meaning. These stories typically redefine our most foundational conceptions about human beings, the world, language, pain. We need to perform research outside of English to understand more about the intersections of trauma and neuroscience and law and history and psychology and sociology and ecology. We need to find new ways into these types of stories and see how they might transform not just victims but the rest of us who shape our culture.”

Everything Vinci writes is beyond himself. Every article or book chapter he publishes has anywhere from 5-7 years of research behind it.

He commented, “The goal is to remain open to that which eludes us, to let go of our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. After all, our responsibility when we read literature lies in the creation of a world hospitable not to us or our imagined needs, but to the unknowable pain and confusion of others. Reading this way is not easy, but it is, I think, a necessary ethical act.”

Since the time of our interview, Vinci has had two more publications emerge, one in a book on global perspectives on trauma theory and another in a journal from Johns Hopkins University Press on American ghost stories in the 1960s. Vinci’s most recent project is a book titled Ghost, Android, Animal: Trauma and Literature Beyond the Human, forthcoming from Routledge Press next year. All Vinci’s publications may be found through any college library database. Books may also be found online for purchase.

Dr. Tony Vinci is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio University Chillicothe. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in English from Southern Illinois University in 2014. Vinci was recently awarded the Presidential Teacher Award for the three-year period of 2019-2022. The award serves to recognize excellence in teaching and the academic pursuits of merit, inside and outside the classroom.