Mentoring a Peer: A Feminist Ethic for Directing Undergraduate Humanities Research

At the start of fall 2016, Katie Heffner, an undergraduate English major at the University of Iowa, began a fellowship with Amy Hildreth Chen, the special collections instruction librarian, for the duration of the 2016-2017 academic year through the Iowa Center for Undergraduate Research (ICRU). While ICRU gave our collaboration an end goal--Katie needed to present her work at an undergraduate research symposia at the end of the year--how we met that goal remained up to us. The approach we took to our relationship unfolded organically over time, but its basis came from our feminist values. After all, we immediately recognized that both of us were unorthodox candidates for this partnership. Katie is a non-traditional undergraduate who is the same age as Amy. Amy is an “alt-ac,” an alternative academic, who works as an academic librarian but who does not hold a library degree and had just begun her position two months prior to meeting Katie. This case study will highlight the benefits of academic librarians directing undergraduate research through a feminist approach that embraces unconventional mentors, collaborative methods, and diverse outcomes in order to advocate for the universal value of close-knit, one-on-one connections. Furthermore, this chapter will highlight how this model of mentorship uniquely suits the needs of nontraditional students.