Tucked comfortably into a well-lit corner conference room of the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library, once a week from August through December a group of scholars, students, and poetry enthusiasts of varied backgrounds meet to discuss the lyrics of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The room is angular, modern, a cool and inviting multi-shaded […]
Grades. Grading. Final Grade. Any variable of the word “grade” is likely to fill me with a confusing combination of panic, unease, and boredom. As a student, grades were fine. I did well enough in academic settings that I could choose to ignore my grades. My undergrad years were spent at a small liberal arts […]
[A version of this post also appears on the blog for EGL 608, the digital humanities seminar.] Christine L. Borgman provides a the following as her definition of scholarly communication: “By scholarly communication we mean the study of how scholars in any field…use and disseminate information through formal and informal channels.” 1 Although Borgman wrote this in […]
Students enter my First Year Composition class thinking that “I” is a dirty word. “Are we allowed to use ‘I’ in this essay?” they ask in the same daring but uncertain tone that they use to ask if they can curse. For them, “I” has been taboo, looked down upon because of the subjectivity, the […]
I’m embarrassed in retrospect by the statement I wrote when I first applied to PhD programs as a recent graduate from SUNY Binghamton. I was living abroad, in love with what I was doing and with my aspirations, and really excited about being so brilliant and insightful. I wrote something in my first paragraph about […]
Check out Caitlin Duffy’s excellent recap of the DH seminar’s visit to the library. Source: 9/7: The Digital Humanities Class Visits the Library | EGL 608: Digital Humanities
I am the teacher of athletes, He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own, He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. –Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855) Walt Whitman has made an interesting resurgence within my research and teaching practice […]
In this blog post I’m going to touch on an issue of personal significance to me, so forgive me if it becomes somewhat vehement in tone. It’s subject is the punctuation sequence [“.]! To clarify, the sequence I am referring to is the close-quotation mark (“), followed by the period (.), or, alternatively, by a […]
When I introduce any Victorian literature to students, I initially ask them to brainstorm words they associate with Victorian, and I write their responses on the blackboard. Overwhelmingly, they see the period and its figures as resoundingly restrained. Though many American college students define the Victorians by their apparently repressed sexuality, troubling gender relations, and […]
Teaching Writing to Students with Learning Disabilities What is a Learning Disability? A learning disability is when a person has extreme difficulty learning in a typical manner. This can be caused by one factor, or many. People who are learning disabled are clinically diagnosed by a professional, be it a pediatrician or a psychologist, and […]