March 16, 2015

RGP: Hassan Melehy, University of North Carolina

Hassan Melehy

Eric Hayot’s invitation to design an entire PhD program from the ground up offered me a welcome opportunity, since one of the last things I did in the five years (2006-11) I spent as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at UNC–Chapel Hill was to coordinate the restructuring of the our program. We have since implemented this proposal, and the students whom we’ve just accepted for fall 2015 will be the first to enroll in it.

Futures

March 5, 2015

RGP: Markus Reisenleitner, York University

Markus Reisenleitner

My presentation introduces two initiatives: diploma programs in Comparative and World Literature (implemented in 2014/15); and a re-thinking of course work that substitutes topic-oriented seminars with a much smaller number of skills-oriented mandatory courses while providing supervisors with the opportunity to regularly meet with their graduate students in a group-like setting (“privatissima”; not yet implemented).

Futures

March 5, 2015

RGP: Eric Hayot, Penn State

Eric Hayot

I recently shared some statistics on the current state of the humanities job market with my colleagues.The number of tenure-track jobs in language and literature is down, this year, 50 percent from where it was in 2007. At the same time, humanities enrollments are declinining dramatically nationwide; maybe not in every program, and not always for the same reasons (English enrollments at Maryland are for instance down 40 percent in three years, probably as a result of a change in the General Education program). Nonetheless the situation certainly seems to have changed.

Futures

March 5, 2015

RGP: Eva-Lynn Jagoe, University of Toronto

Eva-Lynn Jagoe

The White Paper on the Future of the PhD in the Humanities (WP) looks at the increasing number of PhDs and the decreasing number of academic jobs, and argues that there is much to be gained in a society by having people pursue graduate work in the Humanities–i.e., the ability to think critically, to read across discourses, to nurture the senses, and to imagine alternative futures – but that we need to better equip students with skills that are not just honed for academic careers.

Futures

March 5, 2015

RGP: Rachel Gabara, University of Georgia

Rachel Gabara

My B.A. and Ph.D. degrees as well as my first academic job were in Departments and Programs of Comparative Literature. I also received French Maîtrise and Diplôme d’études approfondies (D.E.A.) degrees in Comp Lit, so I claim a certain international experience of the discipline. After all of this training, however, I find myself in my second year serving as Graduate Coordinator for the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia

Futures

March 5, 2015

RGP: Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania

Paul Saint-Amour

Offered the chance to rethink an entire graduate program from the ground up, I started by informally canvassing graduate students and faculty in several departments and institutions (including my own) about what they found most dissatisfying in their programs.

Futures

March 5, 2015

Rethinking Graduate Programs

Eric Hayot

This year's ACL(x) conference, held at the University of South Carolina, included a panel on the future of graduate education in the languages and literatures. Its participants were asked as much as possible to reimagine graduate programs from the ground up -- to begin with no assumptions about what a PhD program might include (classes, for instance), and to from that starting point come up with some practical suggestions about ways things might be different.

Futures

July 3, 2014

The Reign of the Amoeba: Further Thoughts about the Future of Comparative Literature

Gail Finney

Based on recent curricular trends in Comparative Literature, publications in leading online and print journals, and practices implemented by current graduate students and young faculty, this essay suggests that the discipline of Comparative Literature promises to move in increasingly interdisciplinary directions. The metaphor of the amoeba reflects the ability of Comparative Literature to assimilate and nurture itself from other media, such as film and television, and other fields, such as art history, aesthetics, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, ecocriticism, and, notably, Cultural Studies, whose importance for Comparative Literature is exemplified in the online journal CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. The Winter 2014 number of Comparative Literature, examining the concept of remediation from the perspectives of media studies, ecocriticism, the law, disability studies, and education, likewise points to the growing interdisciplinarity of Comparative Literature.