Dr. Vyshali Manivannan
Pace University - Pleasantville
Note: This tenure dossier was submitted in July 2025 and was adjudicated by department-, college-, and university-level promotion and tenure (P&T) committees for most of AY 2025. Following review by the provost, president, and Board of Trustees, I was awarded tenure in Spring 2026, effective starting AY 2026.
I have been supported by many people throughout this process, including my departmental colleagues and co-conspirators in other departments; my friends in writing studies, disability studies, the digital humanities, and literary industries; and my family. These people helped me move into this tenure-track line; advised me on budgeting time and energy towards record-keeping and compiling and creating my tenure materials; shared their own materials with me; prepared me for my third-year review; wrote letters of support; and listened to my anxieties.
I'll be honest: I didn't really apply for many tenure-track jobs when I was on the job market, because with my particular flavors of chronic pain and fatigue, I didn't think I could survive the process of applying for tenure. And honestly, I barely did. Even with all the support I received, applying for tenure was a debilitating process. Writing, compiling, and finalizing my materials exacerbated my chronic pain, chronic fatigue, brain fog, and executive dysfunction; further impaired the quality of my sleep; and worsened ongoing issues with my cervical spine and jugular veins. I submitted my materials in July 2025. At this time of writing in September 2026, I still haven't recovered.
This has informed my decision to make all the non-confidential parts of my tenure dossier open-access, in the hopes that it mitigates some of the health challenges and risks that might otherwise dissuade disabled academics from applying for tenure. I also hope to demystify and streamline the process of applying for tenure for anyone else. Radical opacity around this process doesn't serve marginalized scholars, who are routinely denied tenure-track lines let alone tenure and promotion. Thus, I'm sharing my Executive Summary, a concise summary of my accomplishments and expertise in teaching, creative and scholarly activity, and service; Statement of Professional Impacts, a statement contextualizing institutional expectations, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, going up early, and publishing mostly interdisciplinary, transgenre, digital, multimodal, and/or open access work; Research Statement, a description of my research agenda; Teaching Statement, a description of my approaches to writing pedagogy, assessment, and courses taught; Service Statement, a description of my service to Pace, the discipline, and the public; and Supplemental Material, an appendix of sample materials and other forms of supporting evidence.
This overview is meant to orient you to my portfolio and to interrogate the scarcity of open-access models of tenure dossiers. So much of academia thrives on secrecy. Transparency about its gatekeeping mechanisms — especially when the process is ongoing and success isn't guaranteed, which is when I began constructing this site — is essential to dismantling this culture.
As with all tenure dossiers, this one is tailored to me — my positionality, research interests, pedagogical approaches, and advocacy — and to my institution, Pace University. The value of this dossier isn't that it's a standardized, replicable model for P&T but that it's a model of a successful tenure dossier for a creative-critical scholar whose work exists at strange interdisciplinary intersections — in short, for nontraditional academic work. Finally, while I have been awarded tenure, the materials on this site comprise the in-process materials I submitted for adjudication; any errors they contain have been preserved here, to further model the need for not only increased transparency around tenure materials but also more opportunities to discuss the perception of errors in writing.