The CAUT Bulletin (http://www.cautbulletin.ca/) reports that the Edwin Mellen Press is suing McMaster’s Associate University Librarian Dale Askey for defamation, and this because he blogged what he understood to be a “professional opinion” about the Press’s general level of achievement in scholarly publishing. “The post, and comments following […]
Today, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Bérubé considers the structural disconnect between PhD training in the humanities and the academic job market. “Graduate programs in the humanities,” he writes, “have been designed precisely to replenish the ranks of the professoriate; that is why they have such […]
Here’s the blurb for English Professor Ajay Heble’s public lecture at McMaster University, January 24th, 2013. As a teacher of literature, I’m often called upon to account for what I do: just why do I “profess” literature, why does a study of literary texts matter? In this talk, […]
We all have our histories for “The Department of English,” and mine pre-dates that of Georgia Institute of Technology’s Richard Utz. Utz thinks English as a formal discipline of study begins in mid-nineteenth-century continental Europe. I am persuaded by Gauri Viswanathan’s finding, in Masks of Conquest, that English Studies […]
Michael Bérubé argues that the skills you learn in English Studies “… are useful – and transferable – anywhere there is thinking to be done.” One of those places, he notes, is in the Chairman’s Office of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bérubé’s January 4th defense of […]
