Session #339: paper for AAUSC panel QUO VADIMUS?

Declining numbers of majors have become a pressing concern for chairs of English and Foreign Language departments. With the celebration of STEM disciplines and students’ and parents’ concerns about the job prospects for humanities graduates, English and Foreign Language department chairs find themselves needing to fight for the health of our…[Read more]

Leadership Initiative for Language Learning, July 20-24, 2015, Ohio State University

Gay black representations of the phallus subvert recognizable images of the gay/black phallus, and they draw on a tradition, however brief, of writers who have also possessed and spoken from the gay/black phallus. In thus circumventing symbolic castration,
Saint’s progeny effectively engage in a tentative yet decidedly agentive elaboration of gay…[Read more]

The decline of the language requirement in English doctoral programs will have to be reversed if those in the English profession are to treat global and ethnic studies seriously, to refuse to replicate “spread-eagle” isolationism in their work, to research and teach world literature and English-language literature’s place in it responsibly, and t…[Read more]

Because academic freedom is a function of and entrusted to the corporate faculty, defenses of academic freedom must be articulated in the terms of curricula that are thoughtfully constructed according to disciplinary norms. But this potentially powerful system of protection is weakened when the faculty has little sense of how its curriculum fits…[Read more]

The story of the master’s degree in English and foreign languages since 1966 is most dramatically a story about women’s access to areas of study traditionally dominated by men and more generally a story about how economic shifts influence students’ degree decisions.