Meet Dr. M.K. Foster, a passionate scholar and writer who has traveled a winding academic journey, from studying literature and creative writing to delving deep into the realms of Renaissance studies and the history of science. Along the way, she has won prestigious fellowships, including funded participation in the NEH Seminar on ‘Mapping the Early Modern World’ at the Newberry Library and a MacDowell Fellowship in Literature to support writing her novel in a peaceful retreat. These accolades reflect her unique blend of creativity and scholarship, and each opportunity has deepened her love for research, writing, and teaching.
Read on to discover her inspiring story and the insights she shares from her multifaceted career.
Starting from the beginning, why did you choose to study literature and creative writing in undergrad?
True story: my original plan was medical school! My favorite book as a kid was this wild 1980s medical atlas of the human body, and for years, I was convinced that that was my future. And yet, somewhere along the way, growing up in Alabama, I fell in love with nature, storytelling, poetry, history, art, oceans, animals, trees, monsters, and stars!
I was curious about everything, and I was always looking for wild things to pick up, read, make, and build to fill my imagination, things that felt like they chose me as much as I chose them that helped me block out an ongoing struggle against school bullies. In the fourth grade, I read my first real poem, a Wordsworth poem, and for some reason, I suddenly knew that I would never be alone again and also, inexplicably, that just by reading, I was connected to something ancient, sacred, and beautiful that I wanted to write back to. So I did.
My passions for writing and literature brought me full-ride scholarships to college, and once there, I veered quickly from my medical path and found myself signing an English Lit/Creative Writing major card in short order, which launched me on a path that would lead me to appreciate my mutual passions as both a scholar and creator as inseparable and symbiotic.
Around the same time, I started signing up for leadership studies classes. Although it seemed random at the beginning, I cannot imagine who I am today without that course of study. I highly recommend taking every opportunity to learn about leadership as a science, an art, and a daily masterclass in humility, empathy, and courage of conviction.
You then went on to do a Master’s in Fine Arts. Why did you choose to do an MFA, and why at the University of Maryland?
In college, I spent beautiful three summers at the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Among the many exquisite learning experiences I had there, I picked up the insight to consider an MFA in creative writing and, specifically, to find a program that would provide me with enough funding:
- to take as many classes as I wanted in any field of my choosing,
- to teach and experiment as an interdisciplinary educator,
- to explore new places with enriching arts and academic communities and
- to have ample support and time to write as much as possible.
Of the programs that generously accepted me, UMD’s MFA fit most closely with all of these grad school goals, and I continue to be grateful for all of my experiences there.
Can you share any details about your time as a master’s student?
Being a master’s student is what you make of it, and sometimes, you don’t know what you’re going to work with until you’re on the ground. I went into UMD with my original MFA plans, but what I discovered there in my time beyond the one weekly grad workshop was so much more: specifically, a host of clear, deliberate, long-standing, parallel passions for archival research, teaching, curricula invention, mentorship, museums, collaboration, and Renaissance earthquakes.
I found myself drawn to all kinds of classes in history, translation, digital humanities, and global studies and crafted portfolios based on research at the Smithsonian Museums and the Library of Congress. I found that I loved teaching, and with my leadership studies powers activated, I discovered that teaching spoke to the heart of my original dreams of medical school: my abiding dream of helping people live and live deeply. I also found in one extremely cool, life-changing rollercoaster of class about earthquakes in the early modern literary imagination that I could weave my interdisciplinary passions together, shake it all like a snow globe, and make my creative work academic and academic work creative.
Then you received your PhD in Renaissance Literature/Culture & History of Science! What led you to take this next step?
So, remember that Renaissance earthquake class? And the young word-nerd transfixed by old poetry? And the kid who loved the weird 1980s medical atlas? Well, in 2015, they all came together in the same place, at the same time when I accepted a PhD offer from the University of Alabama’s Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. Honestly, in the beginning, a Renaissance PhD felt like a wild, hard left-turn away from the MFA/Creative route, but once I rooted into my original grad school wish list (i.e. funding, classes, teaching freedom, community, exploration, time to write, etc.), I realized I couldn’t be in a better place to figure myself out as a “renaissance woman” than in a Renaissance program.
UA’s Strode program gave me abundant resources and generous extra funding to write, research, travel, collaborate, teach, and try new things. Within this full range of freedoms, I found my blended academic and creative work increasingly fixated on my original obsessions with science, bodies, nature, oceans, animals, trees, monsters, and stars. One day, I just owned it at a conference and introduced myself as a historian of science with specializations in monstrosity, bodies, sharks, and horror in the natural world of Renaissance Europe.
From then on, I fully embraced all of my projects, especially my dissertation ‘The Flood, the Ark, and the Shark: Narrating the Natural World in Early Modern Europe,’ which took a literary lens to 16th-17thC natural history treatises and atlases to explore mass extinction. And yes, I said “sharks”! Sharks started out as an accidental fuse of archival curiosity that exploded into one of my dominant specializations (sharks and apex predators) and one of my active advocacy directives.
To date, I’ve written several shark projects, including one connecting the Renaissance and Sharknado. I also do elementary school presentations where I talk to kids about the history of sharks, show them my archival images, link the past to current marine biology research on declining shark populations, and walk through best practices for keeping sharks safe from us as much as we keep ourselves safe from them. This full production also includes bringing in a collection of shark stuffed animals. In brief, the curious girl from Alabama became a doctor after all and is living her truth.
After finishing school, you won quite a few fellowships, the first being a funded Fellow for the NEH Seminar. Can you tell us about this opportunity?
Maps are one of my favorite human inventions. There’s nothing else quite like them as a unique combination of concrete and abstract knowledge, science, math, art, history, architecture, imagination, myth, and legend— in other words, they’re very human. I could stare at them for days— and so could other “map people,” which is exactly what happened in Summer 2022.
Being a funded Fellow for the NEH Seminar “Mapping the Early Modern World” at the Newberry Library is the most enriching experience I’ve ever had as an academic because it gave me the opportunity to come into my own as a scholar and to witness myself as an active contributor to the living fields of my disciplines. Not only was I gifted the opportunity to sit in on 4 weeks of lectures by archival map experts, but I was also gifted the chance to explore some of my favorite rare, exquisite research materials at close range while surrounded by about 30 other scholars who were doing the same thing.
There were many, many highlights to the program, including lying back in the floppy Adler Planetarium chairs with 30 of my new closest friends pointing at lunar and stellar maps and whispering about all the archival Renaissance map histories we all just researched. There was also the gorgeous experience of presenting research that was exciting to me (so, sea monsters and sharks!), seeing my work be received by a room of scholars who were immediately just as excited as I was, and then listening to the next scholar present their awesome map research and doing it all over again— it was amazing, and I cannot thank the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry enough for such a fantastical odyssey!
Then, you received a MacDowell Fellowship in Literature! Tell us about this program!
I started writing a wild novel on an ironing board in Chicago in 2022. The Air BnB that I was staying in was a 12ft x 12ft micro studio with a bed, a kitchenette, and a folding chair, and an ironing board was the closest thing I had to a desk! I was about 55 pages into a story weaving together a Southern Gothic narrative with the Renaissance research I was working on at the Newberry when I realized I was going to need a bigger desk.
In 2023, I sent applications to several artist residencies. The novel that I had started was (and still is) unlike any I had ever worked on and any I had ever known, and that was a little scary for me. I knew early on that I needed to find an opportunity that would take a chance on my work. Inspired by the NEH seminar, I hoped to find a supportive, enthusiastic community of fellow professionals, access to research resources, funded space, and peaceful time to create— only MacDowell wrote back.
In February 2024, MacDowell handed me the keys to a beautiful 100+ year old cottage in Peterborough, New Hampshire, which opened the door to the most nourishing experience I’ve ever had as a creator. For almost 3 weeks, I mapped my novel, drafted chapters, and took long walks through beautiful snowy woods. MacDowell gifted me hearth, harbor, and (yes!) a massive desk to work on, but the true treasure was the community: a constellation of vibrant souls working on projects unlike anything they’d ever worked on and any they’d ever known. We got to be scared together. But we were also immediately there to encourage, witness, and listen to one another through everything we felt for the wild projects we were making. It was ancient, sacred, and beautiful
Finally, can you share any advice about applying for multiple fellowships?
The most valuable resource you can have when applying for a new fellowship is your last application that failed. (Especially the ones where you gave it your all.) This is hard for me to say because it was hard for me to learn. It took a lot of long talks with trusted people in my life who tough-love me, a lot of courage to take unknown roads when the way ahead was blocked, and a really good pair of running shoes. And even then, it’s still learning that is hard to keep practicing in daily life. You have to learn to pivot away from seeing your rejections as “my best was not good enough,” and you have to learn to reframe how you approach applications in the first place. It’s a zero-sum game if you go in imagining that the only indicator of application success is acceptance. It’s not. It’s actually one of many, but only you can decide what they are. If you start with a rejected application before working on a new application, you have a unique opportunity to make a list of things you want to strive for in your next application— and the scarier, the better!
Maybe you challenge yourself to ask your toughest editor to review your materials. Maybe you sign up for back-to-back research and personal statement boot camp workshops that overhaul your drafting process and inspire you to confidently tackle even the most daunting, complicated applications (Thank you, ProFellow!!) Maybe you aim to rewrite your application draft for memory to hone what you’re really trying to say. Maybe your goal is just to ask for help. Anything. From there, approach the application list first. For example, you go after the application draft you want to finish and then re-write it for memory. When you turn in that application, you will be able to look at it and say, “Hey! I rewrote that whole thing for memory!” Regardless of how the application goes, you still crushed a big goal, and you probably wrote a dynamite app while you were at it!
I learned this well and true in the wake of rejection for a massive application that I wrote. It was a monster: a sixty-page, single-spaced application that I rewrote twice, and it took me three months, eight all-nighters, and four training workshops at 3 AM to complete. I repeat, this was a rejection, but every time I described that application to someone and their shocked first response was, “wait, it was sixty pages long?!?!” it felt less and less like a rejection and more like something I could claim going forward. By the time I approached a Fulbright application, I had a massive list of goals ready to go, alongside all the skills I’d developed from activating what I’d learned from all the previous applications, and by the time I hit Submit, I had met so many of my application goals that I only felt peace watching it go. And again, this is a practice. I still grieve rejections, but I now find courage and strength in knowing that I have the power to transform them.
Along the lines of transformation: behind my Fulbright journey is another journey that I’ve been on for over two years now to pivot away from conventional academic career paths and towards the goals of full-time writing, independent scholarship, and public humanities work. It’s been a long road, and I am beyond grateful to come so far and to find Fulbright up ahead on my path. I am electric for my upcoming time as a Fulbright US Scholar in Creative Writing to Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland, and I cannot wait to discover how this opportunity will teach and nourish my journey, my art, and my connection to others.
Also, if you’re on a similar journey of pivoting from a conventional academic path, it can feel intimidating to approach big fellowship applications as an independent scholar/writer and feel a bit personal to get a rejection. But you can’t let that stop you. The right fellowship for you is looking at what you’re doing and where you’re going and wants to meet you there. So if you find a match, shoot your shot. What’s the worst that happens? You learn and grow.
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