Dr. Kait Pinder’s (English) intellectual journey with impostor syndrome arose from a personal experience with this perplexing, paradoxical phenomenon. Impostor syndrome, as Dr. Pinder describes it in her 2024 paper, is a name for the feelings of “intellectual fraudulence and lashing self-doubt that often accompany the gendered experience of thinking in public.”

Imposter syndrome was first identified in women psychologists by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes in 1978. And while the phenomenon isn’t exclusive to women, it has notably gendered characteristics in how and where it shows up.

During the stress of the pandemic, Dr. Pinder was, like so many other women in academia, struck with feelings of intellectual fraudulence. And she knew she needed to understand it better.

“For my own sake I wanted to know more,” she says. “Academic work is like that for me; until I figure it out for myself, it will haunt me.” Naturally, this meant she looked to the books.

Initially, she found that existing definitions and explanations “weren’t really touching on what the experience was like, and what is perplexing about it.” The psychological focus (even the word syndrome suggests pathologization) wasn’t satisfying for her.

As a scholar of literature, Dr. Pinder looked to fiction for an answer. “There’s a lot to explore in terms of the discourse around it and the experience of it,” she explains. “I always understand things through culture, literature, and history.” In the early stages of her exploration, in a graduate course she taught on impostor syndrome, Dr. Pinder began seeing the connections between campus novels that deal with the phenomenon. This eventually led her to publish “‘What was failure? What was success?’:The Impostor Syndrome's Literary Transformations” in Modern Fiction Studies last year.

In the paper she explores the literary history of the impostor syndrome through two examples of women protagonists in campus novels and argues that the phenomenon is best understood as a “structure of feeling” that informs how women think in public in a neoliberal system, rather than a psychological condition.

Impostor syndrome is everywhere. But why?

Her investigations into impostor syndrome didn’t stop at literature. Dr. Pinder found that it was everywhere. Her journey down the impostor syndrome rabbit hole led her on some surprising paths and into some perplexing conversations. Some people have told her impostor syndrome isn’t real. Others have said they feel like they should feel like frauds but don’t. Mostly, though, she’s found that those feelings of intellectual fraudulence are even more pervasive than she initially imagined.

And so was people’s lack of understanding about their own feelings around it. “As soon as you talk to someone about impostor syndrome, they have a story about it. But a lot of the people I’ve talked to felt similarly dissatisfied with the understanding that we currently have of it.”

What’s interesting about impostor syndrome, is “if you start thinking about it critically, it becomes a point of connection.” Opening discussions and investigating what exactly it is, for Dr. Pinder, is the first step in dismantling the feeling and how it fits into the power structures that uphold it.

After hearing from other academics who reached out to her after reading her article, Dr. Pinder began to realize how important it was to create an open dialogue about impostor syndrome to create those connections and, hopefully, demystify it. So, as she continues to complicate the contours of impostor syndrome, Dr. Pinder encourages others to join her in the exploration.

“that’s what’s cool about literature”

Dr. Pinder says her goal is to write a book about impostor syndrome that will build on the article published last year.

“Academic writing is not therapy, but it can illuminate aspects of our experience that are difficult to grasp, even when we feel them so strongly. My goal if I write a book about impostor syndrome is that people will say ‘this helped me better understand the world I live in and my experience in it.”

“That’s what’s cool about literature,” she adds. “I think novels have that possibility to describe to us parts of our world and experiences in terms that are unfamiliar enough that we recognize them in new ways.”

These conversations are especially important to have in academic contexts, from which the term “impostor syndrome” originated and continues to run rampant amongst professors and students alike. In fact, she says that she’s heard from students at Acadia that they feel like impostors just by being here. “They can’t believe they’re in university and that they’re good enough.”

But it isn’t just academics who are impacted by it. It is, at its core, she says, “a cultural phenomenon arising from economic insecurities and neoliberalism.” So, it affects everyone who exists in a capitalist system in which we are pushed to merge our self worth with our labour. In short, everyone.

Peggy McIntosh of Invisible Backpack fame wrote in the ‘80s that no one feels like an impostor when petting a cat. And then, says Dr. Pinder, “work alienates us.”

However, we don’t have to accept and bow under the pressure of impostor syndrome. Dr. Pinder suggests that we use the feeling as an indicator that something is off, a check engine light for exploitation, if you will. “When you feel impostor syndrome, it’s kind of like a signal to pay attention to what might be exploiting you,” she explains. “You don’t have to internalize it as a flaw.”

What’s a professor to do?

Part of the work that needs to be done to interrogate impostor syndrome does need to happen in its breeding ground: the academy. And that’s the work that Dr. Pinder is doing. She cautions that “if we continue to do literary studies in a way that discounts the voices of marginalized people and cultivates this sense of genius and mastery of knowledge without intellectual humility, we will continue to breed that sense of fraudulence.”

So, what’s a professor to do? Dr. Pinder says one way that she resists the pull of impostor syndrome is practicing intellectual humility, which is a way of “positively modelling an alternative.” For Dr. Pinder, this means being open to being wrong in the classroom and pushing back against the narratives of mastery and genius.

“For me, in practice, it’s about focusing on questions. How do we learn to ask better questions rather than to recite correct answers. It’s about having that sense of openness to the project of what we’re doing in class together vs the idea that the professor has all the knowledge and students are trying to catch up.”

“My role,” she explains, “is bringing in those bigger questions, historicizing, teaching people how to think about their experiences in historical contexts. I have personally found that very empowering.”

And, she says, it’s basic things too, like finding ways to make sure you’re hearing from people who don’t traditionally “belong.”

So go forth, keep an eye on your check engine light, and remember that you are good enough. And if you aren’t feeling it today, that’s okay—try petting a cat.

Get the Acadia Experience with Dr. Kait Pinder

Along with ENGL 1483/1493, Writing & Reading Critically, Dr. Pinder teaches courses in Canadian literature and literary theory, including ENGL 3073: Advanced Theory and Research Methods, which will be offered in Winter 2026. In July, she will become Head of English and Theatre.