Pushmi-Pullyu: A Joint Autobiography [Acquired Wisdom Series]

Abstract

Author Hugh Lofting introduced the mythical creature the pushmi-pullyu in his 1920 children’s book The Story of Dr. Dolittle. The pushmi-pullyu, a gentle and shy creature, had no tail, but a head at each end of its body, one with the horns of a gazelle, and the other with the horn of a unicorn. The two heads faced in different directions, so that you couldn’t sneak up on it. When one head slept, the other was awake. And for the pushmi-pullyu to move, both heads had to agree on the desired direction.

We use the pushmi-pullyu as a metaphor for our academic lives together. Occasionally, our careers faced in different directions, and we had to agree on how to move forward. In what follows, you’ll read our accounts of our individual academic lives, and also how we navigated moving once our heads were joined together in a single body, as in the case of the pushmi-pullyu.

We’re grateful for the invitation to contribute to the corpus of Acquired Wisdom. But we lack a template for how to write a joint intellectual autobiography—The editor suggested we invent it. To that end, we begin with separate accounts of our development as scholars. After all, we had each lived thirty-some years before we became a couple. The unique contours of our individual lives framed what we brought to the relationship, including the scholarship we produced, alone and together, thereafter. We attend especially to our joint intellectual interactions and real-world experiences in universities, disciplines, and fields. Some of these were marked by hardship and struggle; others by provocative exploration, learning, growth, and just plain fun.