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 […]
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 […]