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 Habitus.
To Zenzele Isoke, habitus means much more than the place you inhabit. It's the way daily actions and surroundings shape you and you shape a place--in her words, "a space that's made through the everyday practices of living, breathing human beings."
Isoke earned her Ph.D. at Rutgers University with a dissertation exploring the lives of women who are choosing to live creatively and powerfully in the devastated inner city of Newark, New Jersey.
She brought that research to Minnesota last year as one of the first three recipients of an innovative new postdoctoral fellowship, sponsored through the Graduate School. The focus of the fellowship is on interdisciplinary scholarship, community engagement, and diversity.
In its first year, the competition attracted nearly 150 applicants from top universities, including Oxford, Harvard, and Berkeley, and in fields from psychiatry to ecology.
"In the humanities and social sciences, postdocs are a privilege," says Isoke. "They give time to build relationships."
Isoke worked with faculty mentors in two College of Liberal Arts departments--political science and gender, women, and sexuality studies--and with a faculty member in the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs.
Another recipient, Ludwin Molina, worked in the departments of political science and psychology. The third, Patina Mendez, worked in a single department--entomology--where postdoctoral experience is common before applying for tenure-track faculty positions.
The Postdoctoral Fellowship was created to support visionary Ph.D.s and build a bridge to the nation's faculty. This year, it began to do just that. Isoke and Molina were offered and accepted tenure-track faculty positions--she at the University of Minnesota and he at the University of Kansas--and Mendez was offered a second postdoctoral year at the University of Minnesota to continue her research.
"If it weren't for the Postdoctoral Fellowship, the three of us never would have met," says Isoke. "Because of the way it's designed, we got to spend time together--and it was amazing the connections we made."
The word habitus, for example. To Patina Mendez, habitus refers more simply to the physical or characteristic appearance of an organism. Mendez studies aquatic insect communities of streams and rivers--in particular, the ecology and evolution of a species of caddisfly well-known to fly fishers.
Connections like the word habitus--humorous, poetic, and profound--enriched the growth of all three as scholars.
A place to create
Isoke brings a personal history of varied habitus to her research. Born in St. Louis, she was raised in Long Beach, California, and moved to Georgia for college. As a first-generation college student--"my friends were all raised by single moms"--she chose Clark University, a historically black college in Atlanta. Before starting graduate school in Michigan and finishing in New Jersey, she worked as a community organizer with mostly welfare-reliant mothers in Selma, Alabana, on issues such as access to water.
 In Newark, Isoke got hooked on the stories of women who lived in the Central Ward, transforming their landscape through what she identified as homemaking, reclamation, and the politics of "selling in." The way they created home had political implications because they cared and advocated for themselves and others--one woman quoted her father as telling her to "create what you want to create--where you are." Some had left the suburbs and returned to Newark because of its black history. Others lived elsewhere but consciously contributed to central Newark's economy and future through work and advocacy.
Isoke set out to document their stories in a way that bridges the gap between communities and universities.
At Rutgers, she was offered a multiyear financial package, a chance to teach, and an energetic, supportive adviser who nominated her for Minnesota's new postdoctoral fellowship. As rare as postdoctoral appointments are in the social sciences, Isoke interviewed for several and turned down other offers to come to Minnesota. Its interdisciplinary and community focus won her over.
"The postdoc gave me time to get a good grip on how my work fits within the larger intellectual community," says Isoke. "It was an opportunity to meet those working at the cutting edge of these issues and to get rich, critical feedback. But the most important part was building relationships across campus."
One of those relationships--with a workshop leader at the Humphrey Institute--gave her the opportunity to lead a workshop with about 20 women community leaders.
"I knew that, if I were going to stay here, I had to have community contacts," she says. "I've framed my work to be applicable to women 'on the ground'--women in the community, building institutions, underpaid but doing it anyway."
The sheer quality of Isoke's contributions to feminist studies, political science, and sociology impressed Professor Eden Torres, a senior member of the faculty in Isoke's new departmental home, who mentored Isoke during the postdoctoral fellowship.
"She is a fresh, young scholar with a complex mind," says Torres. "Her ability to synthesize studies of space utilization, various kinds of violence, political mobilization, and previously undocumented struggles for social justice make her a scholar worth listening to."
A year after her arrival, as a new assistant professor in the University's Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, Isoke taught a course on contemporary black feminisms--"invigorating," she says--and prepared for two new courses for spring. She also kept working on a book based in part on her dissertation. To her study on Newark, she plans to add St. Louis and possibly another city. The north side of Minneapolis is a candidate.
"There are so many people who come together to shape that landscape," she says of the neighborhood in her new urban home.
Meanwhile, two new scholars arrived to join Patina Mendez as this year's postdoctoral fellows.
 Robyn Autry is exploring how race and nation are represented in historical museums, with a special interest in societies after conflict. She's working in the departments of sociology and history.
LaRose Davis is researching convergences of African American and Native American communities, past and present, and writing a book about the role of place in the cultures and literatures of both groups. Her appointments are in English, African American and African studies, and the Institute of Advanced Study.
Jump-start to the future
Postdoctoral fellows have been called the suffering artists of the 21st century, engaged in creative, pathbreaking work at universities around the world.*
About 900 postdoctoral appointees are employed at the University of Minnesota every year. Such positions began in the sciences and were adopted widely over the past 40 years as a way for new Ph.D.s to gain specific experience and publications before applying for tenured positions. Today, they're standard in many fields. The University's Office of Postdoctoral Affairs was established in the Graduate School in 2002 and the U of M Postdoctoral Association in 2003.
The Graduate School's Postdoctoral Fellowship is a small but significant step in enriching the quality of the faculty, providing top, new Ph.D.s with a critical period of professional development in Minnesota before embarking on faculty careers.
But the fellowship is not the only initiative that the Graduate School is taking to speed the transformation of the nation's faculty. It has served as a basis for improving services for all postdoctoral scholars at the University. And the same concept is being applied to the University's new initiative in interdisciplinary informatics, a field destined to become a linchpin of the 21st century knowledge economy. This year, the search is on for another cohort of talent.
"By bringing postdoctoral scholars, we expect to jump-start interdisciplinary research and graduate education in selected areas," says Graduate School dean Gail Dubrow. "They are well-positioned to strengthen established areas of concentration, bridge existing subfields, and pioneer new areas that fuel the University of Minnesota's development as a center of excellence."
Learn more about the University of Minnesota's postdoctoral scholars and the Postdoctoral Fellowship.
*Jonah Lehrer, in Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
This feature first appeared in the 2008-09 issue of Discovery, published annually by the Graduate School for alumni and friends.
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