Welcome to the new academic year! A lot’s happened since the start of the school year, including a goodbye party for Martha Wilson Schaffer (who’s accepted an Assistant Professor job at the University of Toledo College of Law), and the chance for people to welcome our newest staff member and professors: Oyinkansola (Oyin) Akinwuntan, who started both her front office job here and her MBA program in the same week; Assistant Professor Tom Sawyer, who’s already cheering his son on in Shaker Youth soccer matches (and is ready for a rematch against FC Geneva); and alumna Cammy Ring, who joined the full-time Writing Program faculty after a busy summer teaching in the Emerging Scholars Program.

The Little Free Library across from the main office is restocked with new used books, and the Writing Resource Center in Bellflower is looking extra spiffy thanks to a fresh coat of paint. And, after an extended period in storage, our founders’ portraits are back on the walls on the second and third floors of Guilford (a great way to mark what we hope is the end of the extended HVAC upgrade project). Linda Guilford, Helen Mary Smith, Heman Oviatt, Clara Louise Meyers, Eleanor Walter Thomas, and Flora Stone Mather are all looking over the English Department community again—including the major and minor who declared in the first week and were the first recipients of newly created welcome gift bags to mark this important academic milestone with a bit more fanfare.

We have a lot to look forward to in the coming months, including a streamlined Colloquium schedule that makes room on the calendar for a new Writing Program-led event series called First Fridays. The first Colloquium (on September 11th) gave us the chance to welcome alumnus Kent Cartwright back to campus and hear about important things we’ve overlooked in I. A. Richards. We marked the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award weekend with a special “Cold Reads” session on Karan Mahajan, led by Kurt Koenigsberger. Also, we’ll celebrate Homecoming and Lindsay Turner’s new book of poems, Middle Slope, with a special broadside and a poetry reading along with Kortney Morrow on October 9th. And that’s just the beginning. The Guilford Parlor will be hopping…

We’ve got two new core courses that debuted this past month: ENGL 201: Introduction to the English Major and the graduate course ENGL 510: Introduction to Graduate Study, taught by Steve Justice. The undergrads are reading a lot of poems and short stories, while the grad students are focusing mostly on literary critical work published in the last twenty years. But both classes are reading Susan Stewart’s 2014 article “On ED’s 754/764” at different points in the term. (No plot spoilers here, but I can’t wait for the students to get to Stewart’s delightful interpretation of Dickinson’s poetic speaker with the “loaded gun” of a life.)

To get ready for ENGL 201, I spent much of the summer doing background reading, including Stefan Collini’s riveting recent book Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain. In the process, I compiled the following list of reasons for studying English literature offered between 1830 and 1930, which I shared with the ENGL 201 undergrads on the first day of class:

Because it was practical: it would immediately help you do or get a particular kind of job

Because it cultivated moral virtue

Because it helped people move up (or maintain their high place) in social life

Because it contributed positively to citizenship/public life (including by shaping people’s thinking about their nation and national belonging more generally)

Because it helped people better understand history

Because it improved the way people speak

Because it promoted class harmony

Because it offered an alternative to religion

Because attending to things of beauty was inherently valuable

Because it helped people realize that novels and poems are the product of a constellation of choices rather than inevitabilities

Because it was an appropriately feminine subject for women

Because it helped people become better writers

Because it enabled an imaginative connection with people from earlier times

Because literature was fun and students were going to gravitate to it anyway

And…

Because it helped create the habits of mind that would stand people in good stead professionally and conduce to their happiness for the rest of their lives. (Even though it was hard to measure how or explain why this profound, transformative personal formation worked.)

The class thought that some of those old rationales seem surprisingly current, and I agree. I’ve heard people voice versions of many of them over the past few years, especially when arguing about what the discipline is or isn’t, or where we should invest our time and resources, or what we should ask of students, or how we should respond to the disruptions of generative AI.

Speaking of AI: also on my summer reading list was Vivienne Ming’s Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People. Also, Ursula Le Guin’s experimental ethnographic novel Also Coming Home and a lot of Mary Oliver essays. And, just for fun, I reread Howl’s Moving Castle (which was recommended to me last year by a sophomore English major). Things here are way too busy and a little too dusty (because of the summer construction work). Guilford and Bellflower are full of big plans and good energy. I look forward to keeping you posted on all of it.

All best,

Chi