I recently had the pleasure and honor of sitting down with Sid Ray, Ph.D., Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies and Co-Chair of Pace University’s English department, alongside Stephanie Hsu, Ph.D. Sid and the rest of the English department are leading groundbreaking projects and endeavors that span not only outside of the bounds of Pace itself, but have created the opportunity for progress in documenting the disaster of climate change and in the discovery of the Indigenous, Black, and LGBTQ+ histories that have been suppressed under layers upon layers of colonial concealment and erasure. It is for reasons like these, among others, that you should consider becoming a part of such a pioneering—yet undervalued—department here at Pace.

For starters, with the help of Sid, Associate Professor of English Kelley Kreitz, Ph.D., and Clinical Associate Professor of History Maria T. Iacullo-Bird, Ph.D., Pace was recently awarded two huge grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. $150,000 of this fund will go toward a project called “The Ground Beneath Our Feet: Centering Place-Based Humanities in the Curriculum,” to launch the Lower Manhattan Humanities Consortium (LMHC). This will bring Pace closer to its community by teaming up with the South Street Seaport Museum, Billion Oyster Project, and Trinity Church, among others, to document and provide research opportunities for humanities courses, internships, individual research projects, and civic engagement endeavors at Pace. An additional $200,000 will go toward another goal of this project: to fund the construction of humanities-specific learning spaces in 1 Pace Plaza and the creation of new opportunities for experiential learning and student research directly on Pace’s campus. This whole project endeavors, through partnerships with the LMHC, to tell untold stories and to project silenced voices, in both studying our history—like that of the Indigenous cultures who farmed oysters in the East River—and changing our future—by restoring those oysters to the New York harbor to filter its toxicity and pollution. Joining projects in which the English department is involved, like “The Ground Beneath Our Feet,” will put you on the cutting-edge of both historical discovery and innovative investment in our future.  

With such an inspirational career, I wanted to know what Sid had done to get to where she is today. Being the daughter of a Shakespearean, and a self-proclaimed “nepo-baby,” Sid knew early on that she had a passion for academia. But she was conflicted, like many of us at Pace, in choosing between her love of theater and acting and her talent in research and analysis. She attended Wesleyan University for theater but switched to English to complete her degree. It was here that she decided to become a Shakespeare scholar, continuing on to get her master’s and Ph.D. from Rochester University. From there, she was hired at Pace University as an assistant professor on the tenure track, teaching classes while conducting research on Shakespeare, writing and editing her published works, and running committees. Now that she is a tenured professor and co-chair of the English department, Sid dedicates much of her time outside of class and department meetings to mentoring students in research projects just like the “Ground Beneath Our Feet” project.

Sid’s path to the top was tough, however, and it has not become much easier. The political nature of committees like that which runs the English department made it difficult to enact the change she and her peers wanted to see, regarding, for example, the lack of gender, race, and disability representation. Sid has “seen some things that [she] can’t unsee” in her time as a part of Pace administration, but we are better for it, and continuing to improve. As she advises, “You have to fight to make change, make things equitable” for those who are underrepresented and unheard. Now, Sid faces a different sort of struggle: “The humanities have been decimated, and we’re trying to turn the tide.” With the recent advent of and emphasis on STEM in primary and secondary education, it is a nationally-acknowledged fact that the humanities and liberal arts have been left behind, even as our world has come to need literature, art, and history more than ever. Sid laments that, in the past ten years, humanities departments at Pace and across the nation are bereft of young scholars, of incoming assistant professors, and of funding—and thus, the nation is lacking in new knowledge. Pace Associate Professor Sarah Blackwood, Ph.D., argues this point exceedingly well in her The New York Review article “Letter from an English Department on the Brink,” which Sid invites you to read.

As our conversation came to a close, I wanted to know what advice Sid had to give to current students, regardless of major, department, or school. Her first piece of advice: work the system. She has noticed, in Pace students specifically, a sort of “urbane understanding of how the world works,” and Sid implores us to use that to our advantage in forging our own paths. Being in New York City, we have more opportunity for success at our fingertips than many other university students in the world. For this reason, Sid tells us to persist, to “keep at it, find the balance [between passion and work] to pay the rent.” Though she acknowledges that her success story was possible in large part due to her privilege, Sid has seen enough students and peers who, thinking they would never succeed in their field, “keep the dream alive” and end up performing, for example, in the national tour of The Book of Mormon with a degree in Arts and Entertainment Management. She also stresses the importance of financial literacy and planning, which was what helped her to “find a livable way to do what [she loves] in one of the greatest cities in the world.” Finally, Sid reminds us that “community is everything; the reason that we’re cooking in the English department is because we’re a community.”