Jodie Austin is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and American Literature. At present, she is working on a paper exploring the "dilemma faced by students and universities in choosing whether or not to utilize services offered by websites such as Turnitin.com, which scans papers for plagiarism red-flags." She will present the paper at the Oct. 9 conference of graduate students titled "States of Crisis."JustArts: How did you come to choose Brandeis for your graduate work?

Jodie Austin: I came to choose Brandeis mainly because some of my favorite professors at [University of Californa,] Santa Barbara had done their graduate work at Brandeis, including Prof. Sheridan Blau [Ph.D. '67] in the English and Education Departments at [University of Californa, Santa Barbara] and the poet Shirley Geok-Lin Lim [Ph.D. '73]. Both of them had wonderful things to say about their own graduate experiences at Brandeis, and I was interested in doing work at a campus that was not in California. ... I hoped that by coming to the East Coast, I'd be able to expose myself to some schools of thought I'd be less likely to encounter on the West [Coast]. Plus, where else can you find a campus with a castle in the States?

JA: What is your dissertation going to be about?

Austin: Right now my area of concentration is in the Renaissance, although I'll most likely find a way to balance my interests in new media by pursuing research of continually relevant issues like publication, copyright and authorship.

JA: Would you say that a lot of your work has a sociological/social science flavor to it?

Austin: When our conference committee originally got together to brainstorm ideas for the 2009 theme, we were hoping to hoping to find a sort of "umbrella topic" that could be pursued from a variety of angles. Although the topic of the economic recession was (and still is) a hot-button issue right now, we felt that if we limited our discussion to portrayals of economics in and out of literature we would be ignoring the larger ramifications of the recession itself. ... We've certainly felt our share of the impact here at Brandeis. By deciding upon "Crisis" as our main theme for this conference, we envisioned hearing from representatives of multiple fields who had as many creative solutions to offer along with depictions of crises, old and new.

On a more personal note, I've spoken to many non-English majors who assume that the bulk of our studies are spent performing close-reading techniques on classic literature and that inevitably, this places us on the fast-track to a teaching career as our only recourse after graduate school. ... The questions we encounter in literature are no less relevant when asked from an empirical or a scientific standpoint. As an English major, I use literature as my starting point for formulating questions, such as questions about crisis. Literature becomes my primary method of inquiry for engaging other disciplines, be they architecture, film or mathematics. You might say that it's my "lens of choice." Just don't ask me to explain quantum mechanics in a nutshell, and we'll be fine.

JA: Can you opine a little about the benefits/drawbacks of services like Turnitin.com?

Austin: I'm trying to remain as objective as possible in my research on services like Turnitin.com; on the other hand, I'm also trying to make a statement about how the availability of materials online have irrevocably changed the research landscape for students and instructors alike. ... The epistemological floodgates have been opened, so to speak, and it's going to be pretty hard to just put a stopper on the flow of information that students encounter every time they go online. Most students have a hard enough time not being bombarded by ads for free papers when they do their research. My current opinion, however cliché-sounding, is that we should look toward ways of harnessing this flow instead of ... [fighting] the current.