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The Experience in English at Washington University Robust
intellectual communities have to find their center of gravity in the
world of research. Intellectual exchanges among students, between
different departments and programs, and students and faculty have long
established channels in the Department of English at Washington
University. We participate, for example, in the Early Modern
Dissertation Group, an interdisciplinary forum in which students and
faculty from various disciplines gather to discuss chapters of student
theses. The department also maintains student colloquia in which
students give oral presentations of their work to a mixed audience of
faculty and students. We have a faculty colloquium where faculty
members present their research to their peers--colleagues and students.
Our department is aligned with programs that offer special certificates
for graduate students (currently in teaching writing, Women and Gender
Studies, and American Cultural Studies). There are summer seminars for
advanced graduate students in the early modern and the modern periods,
with stipends financed by the Mellon Foundation. The Hurst Endowment
allows us to bring in a significant number of distinguished
visitors--and so on.
Numerous opportunities for experiencing intellectual community in our
department already exist. But as we have been thinking about expanding
these opportunities, several questions have come to haunt us: it is
easy enough to increase the number of venues and opportunities for
intellectual exchange, but how do we increase the intensity of the
engagement with texts and ideas? It is easy enough to get people in a
room to talk about their work to others, but how can we more
deliberately foster intellectual identities and scholarly personae? Is
doing more of the same going to produce a leap in quality? Our
department does not pretend to have answers to these questions, but
there are a few things that we have been doing and are starting to do
that strike us as important in reaching beyond intellectual communities
as usual.
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Americanist Colloquium The
department's external review identified American literary studies as
central to our intellectual life and identity, but saw the need for
some rebuilding and refashioning. We were able to search for new
faculty in two consecutive years, 2003-4 and 2004-5. In the latter case
we ran alongside the search a faculty and graduate colloquium called
American Literary Studies: the Possible Futures. The colloquium met
most weeks on Friday afternoons and was organized by the junior
American faculty and postdocs. Faculty and graduates led discussions on
the interdisciplinary interfaces at Washington University between
American literature and other programs (American Culture Studies,
African and African American, Women's and Gender Studies, Comparative
Literature, Religious studies) and on current intellectual issues in
the field. These discussions informed the hiring process: job visits
became venues for the active engagement of the entire community. The
colloquium was extended to the whole year because of the momentum
created, and will be the model for future colloquia in this and other
fields. Though most of the energy came from our own community, the
colloquium process benefited enormously from carefully integrated
visits by Wai Chee Dimock (Yale), Werner Sollers (Harvard) and Paul
Giles (Oxford).
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Medieval Dissertation Seminar The
medieval dissertation seminar meets weekly for credit each spring
semester, and is attended by the medievalist faculty (David Lawton;
Jessica Rosenfeld from 2005-6), the eight Ph.D. candidates who have
declared the field and others interested in doing so. Its agenda is
created by the group itself. In the two years it has operated, this has
entailed deepening skills and reading (for example, in codicology and
Old French); an overview by faculty of their perception of the field,
current scholarship and future scholarly directions; graduate
presentations on their research topics; writing reviews and conference
presentations; commenting on each other's drafts; and other shared
projects felt likely to benefit everyone. Graduate response has been
extremely positive, with most finding it more valuable than
conventional text- or topic-based courses.
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Intro to Graduate Studies II: Writing in the Field Taught
in the spring of the first year of the graduate program, this course is
obligatory for all incoming graduate students. It focuses on the
intellectual challenges that arise from sophisticated critical writing
and the identity of the various fields within which research is
conducted in English. The class is visited by members of the faculty
who make drafts of their current work available and discuss writing and
research problems with the students. These faculty members introduce
students into their fields of concentration, their history and their
current state. The course workshops the graduates' own writing, and
attempts to set up lasting habits of exchange. Our aim is to establish
a departmental culture in which we are all writers, teaching writing at
various levels, and to make real connections between graduates' own
practice and their teaching of writing (which begins in their second
year). We will be offering this course for the first time this spring.
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Collaborative Teaching The
department is increasingly conscious that the graduate experience of
intellectual community should extend beyond the strict parameters of
research into the classroom. All graduate students in our
program--after they served a year as writing instructors--are
encouraged to collaborate with a faculty member on the designing and
teaching of a class. This strikes us not only as an important stepping
stone between the otherwise isolated territories of teaching writing
and self-designed literature classes, but also as a critical factor in
the creation of an expanded sense of intellectual community. The
opportunity genuinely to cooperate with a faculty member in the
designing and teaching of a class contributes vitally to the
development of a scholarly persona.
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Prospects These
are some of the practical responses our department has found in trying
to expand intellectual community. Yet the most pressing questions still
need answers: what is an intellectual identity? What is a scholarly
persona? Only with a more developed sense of what the answers might be
can we begin to think more deliberately about intellectual community. Contacts:
David Lawton, Chair (dalawton@wustl.edu); Wolfram Schmidgen, Director
of Graduate Studies (wschmidg@wustl.edu); Katie Parker, Graduate
Representative (klparker@wustl.edu).
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