{"id":37755,"date":"2024-05-03T10:43:12","date_gmt":"2024-05-03T02:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/?p=37755"},"modified":"2025-04-24T15:31:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T07:31:10","slug":"interview-with-dr-otto-heim-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/37755\/interview-with-dr-otto-heim-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Dr. Otto Heim: Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Khadija Azhar and Luisa Wan<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is part two of our interview with Dr. Otto Heim, the Director of the Master of Arts in English Studies programme at HKU. Previously, we discussed Dr. Heim\u2019s extensive academic career and his thoughts on teaching. As he spoke about the extensive reading that go into his lecture preparations, it became gradually apparent to us that Dr. Heim\u2019s teaching was very much shaped by its proximity to research. Thus, in the second part of the interview, we focused our conversation on the balancing act between research and teaching, as well as the idea of academic priorities. While Dr. Heim\u2019s experience inevitably reveals the give-and-take that makes a dual commitment to ethical research and pedagogy possible, his refreshing perspective invites us to reconsider what we commonly deem to be valuable in scholarly contribution. In the age of KPIs and QS rankings, Dr. Heim\u2019s story is a much-needed reminder about the creative and ethical possibilities that are uniquely afforded to the academic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the publication of the first part of our interview, Dr. Heim was conferred the inaugural Excellent and Inclusive Practice Award. The award was established by CEDARS at HKU to honour staff members who promote inclusive education, particularly in supporting students with special educational needs (SEN). To learn more about Dr. Heim\u2019s approach to teaching, the first part of our interview can be found<\/em> <\/em><\/a>here<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As junior academics, we\u2019ve often been told that research and pedagogy would ideally feed into or sustain one another. However, this is much easier said than done. We can imagine that the scale of administration and teaching duties can be overwhelming for a professor. How do you see this dynamic between research and teaching? How have you handled it before?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some ways, I think it needs to come down to priorities. There are colleagues here who probably manage things better than I did, but where I\u2019m at and where I\u2019ve been over the last few years has allowed me the freedom to prioritize. Of course, an importance difference is also if you\u2019re on the tenure-track or if you have tenure. For people like me who\u2019ve had the chance to work in the same place as I did for ten, twenty, soon twenty-five years \u2013 we\u2019ve had the chance to become really productive in the way we connect teaching, research, and administration. That means, in my experience, we\u2019ve become more confident about organizing conferences and about publishing. It\u2019s the same in the classroom \u2013 you are able to come up with interesting connections that you can shape into courses, and you can play a role in curriculum review and planning at a higher institutional level or serve as external examiner at another university. This takes time\u2014longer than universities like to allow. If you\u2019re fortunate, you actually get this time, and then there is less pressure. But it also depends, of course, on your ambitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point, I made a pretty conscious decision about what mattered to me. At HKU, the retirement age is 60, so you have to square that and decide what you want to do. Now I\u2019m 62 and I\u2019m still here \u2013 just doing something different. I was quite happy to stay an associate professor and do what I want rather than aim for something that I knew would require me to change my priorities. That was, of course, stressful because there are always other expectations, which are partly institutionalized into the job. The expectation of a certain level of productivity that is narrowly assessed in terms of a couple of measurable criteria can be stifling, but it\u2019s difficult to resist it. You have to think about the consequences and how to demonstrate the quality of your work by alternative criteria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was tenured in 2009, but tenure is not something you can take for granted. You have to have a plan B and plan C. Once I was tenured, I had to think carefully about how to make the most of the freedom that comes with it. For me, this meant questioning the university\u2019s prioritization of the academic division of labour (i.e. research, teaching, administration) and recognizing what I could and couldn\u2019t do. I have always found it difficult to treat one of these domains as more important than the others, and as a result, tended to invest more time in teaching and administration than I was advised to do. But I always felt that was important, and I was suspicious of the university\u2019s progressive centralization of administration in the name of giving academic staff more time for research. The university is not a centralized corporation, and we shouldn\u2019t run it that way. We need to be very careful about what we might give up in the name of saving time. So, at the bigger level, committing to these different parts of our job is a question of defending institutional autonomy. In other words, these various duties are as much a part of our intellectual role as what counts as research, and it\u2019s actually necessary that we have some oversight about how the university is organized, or we risk being disempowered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ideally, the balance comes down to an intellectually stimulating job and evidence of tangible contributions that are recognized by peers. For me, that has always been a matter of refusing the parcelling out and compartmentalization of research, teaching and admin. For me, these things must be connected \u2013 including the admin. If I just look at them as separate things, then something suffers as a result, and it becomes difficult for me to keep up my motivation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think your research has benefited from the other dimensions of academic life? Has teaching complicated or enriched your research and your way of thinking?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, it has in various ways. On the one hand, to teach, I always have to read outwards. For research, you need to do more focused reading within your field, and it\u2019s hard to stay on the outside. Teaching has certainly helped me formulate and plan the new articles I wanted to write, which often then led to conferences or symposiums that I wanted to organize. In that sense, the impulse for research ideas and projects came from my interactions with teaching, and that for me has been very helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I found to be most interesting or rewarding in teaching as well as research are actually the more interactive elements (and in a sense this is also true of administration, another word for which is politics). I do like to write, but I find I need an occasion to write\u2014a conference, a special issue, or a collection. As a result, my writing has tended to focus on articles and essays, and to some extent, editorial work. I get a sense of satisfaction from having organized certain conferences at HKU that were new, that weren\u2019t something we had done before. That, of course, requires a certain amount of administrative know-how because you need funding, and to get them off the ground you need to know how the institution works in order to create, or even imagine, a gathering that you could organize. But for me, the most important thing in research is the contribution to a collective project, a common concern that can find a response outside academia. I can see that connection to the real world when people come together and share that experience and vision. People still talk and write to you about collaborative projects years afterwards, and how they inspired new work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It again comes back to priorities. No doubt I also rationalize \u2013 I\u2019m just not good at writing books. I can draw up plans and outlines for books, but then after a while, I will feel like I have something more important to do. Partly because of the privilege I\u2019ve had, my research has moved in the direction of more collaborative projects: conferences, being associated with certain small journals that people care enough about to curate, which is certainly the case in the field I work in, but also working with doctoral students, and more recently collaboration in non-academic endeavours like festivals and documentaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was doing research in the Pacific \u2013 in Oceania \u2013 in performance studies. When you go to conferences, you see that this is a very cross-cultural gathering where interesting discussions and transfers have to take place between the creators, the critics and the scholars. In some parts of the world, these interactions always have a certain political relevance, which makes you think about why people write. A good friend of mine from Guam is a very innovative and highly regarded experimental poet, but he is also very engaged and involved in the space of writing there \u2013 both in Hawai\u2018i, where he lives and teaches, and in the wider Pacific. Knowing people like him, you can\u2019t just look at the poetry and write about it as some literary thing of universal interest. You need to negotiate your position as an outsider and an academic so that your work is not just an intrusion or a claim to something that you have no right to. You have to consider instead how your own writing can belong in that same space. I find that important and interesting. It makes me think about the audience or the public with whom I want to share my research, and what the role of knowledge is among their concerns. I think this is what has attracted me to theatre studies, because it involves live encounters, both inside and outside the theatre, and much of the critical discussion is conversational. There is a non-academic relationship between the spoken and the written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you balance that \u2013 the feeling of intruding in a space versus actively working on something that will be productive for the space that you\u2019re studying?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You begin by learning. Very often, in communities that are formed around something that they value, that they don\u2019t mind sharing. There are limits, of course. I was working in areas of indigenous knowledge, which is sometimes very carefully guarded. My experience is that people welcome you if you want to learn. It helps to clarify how there is an international division of labour in the knowledge industry as well \u2013 that different kinds of expertise need each other. So, if you can define more clearly what you can bring to that web of knowledge, then at some point you can enter into that dialogue. You may think about where to network or what those contacts mean to you \u2013 not just in a narrow sense of academic networking but more in terms of belonging to a certain community, or having a relationship to a certain community of practice. In my experience, this takes time, but it has been one of the most rewarding dimensions of my scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember when I was working on my PhD, I went to New Zealand for the first time in 1991 and then I stayed there for a longer stretch, in 1993-94. During that time, I reached out to the writers I was writing about\u2014M\u0101ori writers and scholars. I met with them; they were all very welcoming. I had meetings and interviews with them and got to know them, and that informed partly how I thought about the work. I never thought about that connection as somehow compromising my academic integrity.Some people might then say that you\u2019re no longer objective, but at the same time, it\u2019s like saying that you should abstract the writing (including your own) from the space where it came from, and that makes no sense. Being, as it were, welcomed and invited and acknowledged in that world, your work simply evolves from there. Literary studies does not have explicit rules for this in the way that, say, anthropology has, but some of the indigenous protocols of knowledge production and sharing that have been outlined in the work of scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith and others are good guidelines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later on, when you have a position as an academic, you are able to do some things and have a certain obligation to facilitate and make events happen that are also appreciated in other communities. There\u2019s an evolving sense of collaboration. Again, it matters that you can be part of an interactive community: poets post their work online, academics share their scholarly publications in the same space, and activists do so too by reporting on grassroots initiatives. Some people write into their bios \u2013 academic, poet, activist \u2013 all three roles. With that in mind, I think it\u2019s interesting to think about one\u2019s work in terms of how it engages with these positions, so that one doesn\u2019t pretend that they do all of these things alone. Few people can. Some do, and when it works it can generate innovative dialogues or collages of different discourses. More often, you need to recognize the ways through which different people can mutually support and sustain each other. As a critic, that doesn\u2019t mean that you only write good things about the poetry that is written, but you always try to engage with the work as it stands. For me, this kind of dialogue has been the most rewarding part of my research and some of my most cherished friendships are with writers whose work I have critically discussed in academic publications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the topic of theatre studies, we feel like there\u2019s a huge performative element to teaching. Can you share some things that you do to prepare yourself for a class, or what you do to unwind after a class?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m often under pressure to finish things before class. In a sense, that is not bad. Occasionally, that makes me identify things that aren\u2019t working. I actually need a week to read and bring together texts to organize and transform them into something that I want to teach. I need things to be fresh when I walk into the classroom. If they\u2019re not, then I feel a greater need to refresh my memory such that I\u2019m not worried about forgetting or overlooking things. That means that before every class I try to contextualize the week\u2019s topic with reference to fresh readings and current news. This is not as difficult as it may sound, but it is time-consuming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teaching is performative but that\u2019s important. I think it\u2019s necessary to always maintain respect for the space one enters. That requires preparation that will allow you to translate a monologue (a lecture script) into a conversational experience that is engaging so that no one falls asleep. And after class, you need time to wind down. Lately, I\u2019ve been teaching mostly in the evenings, which is good because I find it difficult to go back to my desk and focus immediately after class, open a book and read, for instance, or concentrate on something else. My mind is still preoccupied with what happened in the classroom. But it\u2019s not a bad experience. Personally, I think you may discover whether you have a vocation for teaching, that this is something you want to do, precisely because you take a while to wind down, and you\u2019re not sure how things will work when you walk into the classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I live on another island, so the ferry ride allows me to unwind. When I take the ferry back in the afternoon, I\u2019m more likely to fall asleep than when I\u2019m taking the ferry back after a class at ten in the evening. You have ideas, you might take notes of things while they\u2019re fresh. That becomes a starting point for the following week. In a large class, students bring up things in the week that makes you think, \u201cOh, what did I do?\u201d. That\u2019s good, you know, because that means the conversation is alive. Sometimes things may come up and you think, \u201cOh I need to be careful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of being careful, how do you deal with sensitive topics or discussions in the classroom?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By inclination, I\u2019m more reckless \u2013 but I do have a sense that the conversation is something I must control. This is something I\u2019ve also had to explain to students, because sometimes they ask what they can talk about. Of course, it depends on the group because the bigger the group the more difficult it is for students to express themselves. In smaller groups, you have opportunities where students may say, \u201cCan we talk about that?\u201d. Usually, my answer is \u201cYes, of course\u201d. That is something we defend \u2013 because how else can we think? It\u2019s really important to me that as long as you\u2019re respectful, as long as you recognize each other\u2019s dignity, then it doesn\u2019t matter if we\u2019re 5 or 10 or 50 or 120 people. As long as you can keep that clear, I feel the question of sensitivity is less of a burden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But frankly, I haven\u2019t encountered that as a burden, especially say recently in Hong Kong, where sometimes you feel like you must not talk about politics or freedom. This is the good thing about literature; it is this strange institution that, as Derrida said, allows you to say anything. Pedagogically \u2013 to go back to the beginning \u2013 what I want students to take away is that fiction is a way of talking about the world. People write imaginatively to create a world that is not ours, but it helps us to think about our world. We need to really make the most of that, and it means we need to resist claims that say \u2013 \u201cOh, this is exactly like our world!\u201d. No, it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s an imagined world designed to make us look at our own world differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was interesting to teach science fiction, especially dystopia, which is far more popular than utopia, and sometimes readers mistake it for realism or a kind of allegory. If you read a text as purely allegorical, then why are we reading it? Don\u2019t lose the imaginative distance that we need to make the most of literature. I\u2019m sure there are other subjects where maintaining that distance is more difficult, but in literature we have that other language to talk about our world, which to me is really important \u2013 that students at any level are not denied the resource of writing that disturbs or disrupts the order in which the world is ordinarily represented or thought about. Sometimes we need to be careful not to fall into a certain defeatism ourselves, but we can always begin by saying that it\u2019s a story. No one said that it is our world; let\u2019s see how things are different there. Science fiction is particularly interesting that way. In \u201cWriting and Violence\u201d, a course I designed in 2019, I felt that it was very important to have a class where we take advantage of the fact that others have long written about things that we\u2019re also grappling with, and they\u2019ve come up with stories and frames that provide us with opportunities to think through our current predicaments by recognizing that our world is different. Then, at that point, you can begin to think about how it is relevant to things around you today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is really important, and it always helps, I think, to show that everything has a history, which means it was different, and that we\u2019re not trapped in the present, because we can access history in fiction, any genre of it, as an imaginative resource. Everything has a history that allows us to see possibilities in the real world that we might not even imagine or be capable of imagining if it wasn\u2019t for literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Khadija Azhar and Luisa Wan This is part two of our interview with Dr. Otto Heim, the Director of the Master of Arts in English Studies programme at HKU. Previously, we discussed Dr. Heim\u2019s extensive academic career and his thoughts on teaching. As he spoke about the extensive reading that go into his lectureContinue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28572,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37755"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37756,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37755\/revisions\/37756"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}