“The narrative essay was the easiest because all I had to do was write about myself,” and “I struggled with the personal narrative the most because I’m not used to writing about myself to a wider audience” are the reactions I usually get from my First Year Composition students when, at the end of fifteen […]
During the keynote address at this year’s English graduate conference here at Stony Brook University, guest speaker Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, quipped that President Donald Trump reminded her of a particular member of her family (she did not mean this as a compliment). Duggan’s joke reveals an essential fact […]
Not that Homer. I mean the one with two names: Homer Goldberg. I regret that I didn’t take the opportunity to add my two cents to his tribute when he passed last year. As you may know, he was a master teacher in the English Department for many years (see his obituary here). I was […]
“Now I don’t mean to point fingers,” began a Stanford University Career Center Coach in the audience of a Q&A held after a panel at MLA 2018, “But humanities PhD students historically under-participate every time we hold professional career workshops for paths both inside and outside academia and we don’t really know why.” The panel […]
Sometimes we can leave a class feeling pretty good. The discussion went well, we think: it was lively, insightful, sophisticated. As instructors, we spoke a lot, so the class was certainly engaging for us. But if we’re honest, we may have to admit that only about a third of the students spoke—the same people who […]