The Office Hour, Chapter 12: “Refusing to Read”

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In our first episode of 2017, Toby and I debate Amy Hungerford’s Chronicle of Higher Education editorial, “On Not Reading.” Along the way, Toby shares some of his expertise about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and I divulge my inexpertise about J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Special thanks to the panelists in the Modern Language Association 2017 session,… Continue reading

Applications Open for 2017-2018 Brittain Fellowship

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  The Writing and Communication Program is now accepting applications for new Brittain Fellows. The job ad has been posted at Vitae, and appears below. To apply, please consult the job ad below and submit applications by February 1, 2017. The Writing and Communication Program in Georgia Tech’s School of… Continue reading

Meditations in an Emergency: Teaching After Trump

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The outcome of the 2016 presidential election has thrown a number of institutions into crisis––or at least deep soul-searching: the news media, the Electoral College, the Democratic Party, libraries, humanities departments, and the university more broadly. The first-year composition classroom, in particular, faces newly urgent pedagogical challenges in the wake… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 11: “What We’re Reading”

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In our final episode of 2016, Toby and I discuss the books we’re currently obsessed with, which include (but are definitely not limited to): James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History and The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood; Daniel Clowes’s Patience; Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany; Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories; and… Continue reading

The Texts of Tech: Students Transform Public Science

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This fall, I have been teaching a section of first-year composition I call “Science in Public.” The course’s thematic focus—public-facing science communication—prompts students to consider how journalists, artists, activists, researchers, and other communicators compose texts about the sciences that engage and move to action a broad, nonspecialist audience. Students adapt… Continue reading

Ugliness and Social Rebellion: A Conversation with Monica Miller

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Monica C. Miller is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow and the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. A participant in the 2014 National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor,” her work focuses on the intersections of region and gender in… Continue reading

From Print Culture to Digital Archive: Teaching Modernism through Little Magazines

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Modernism, they say, began in the magazines. Long before internet streaming and wireless television, newspapers and periodicals were the first mass media, offering authors, intellectuals, and social activists a dramatically wider domain for their artwork and ideals. These print media provided a vital outlet—and at times a much-needed sanctuary—for modernist… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 9: “One Week Out”

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On this week’s podcast, Toby and I are joined by Brittain Fellows Anna Ioanes and Jennifer Forsthoefel to discuss our experiences, realizations, thoughts, and fears as teachers and scholars in the week since Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States. We begin by discussing Daveena Tauber’s “Post-Election… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 8: “Seasonal Allegories (A Post-Halloween Special)”

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We had to take a week off last week due to some technical difficulties, but Toby and I are back with a Halloween special in which we discuss our spookiest academic fears. These include Northrop Frye’s theory of archetypes, the ongoing adjunctification of higher education, Donald Trump, and other nightmarish… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 7: “’90s D*** Dads”

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Last week, we heard Toby reflect on his thoughts and experiences as both an academic and as a father. This week, Brittain Fellow Owen Cantrell and I (neither of whom have any children) discuss a very different kind of father: the “’90s Dick Dad,” as exemplified by Tim Allen in The… Continue reading

A Good Marriage Is a WOVEN Marriage: Multimodal Communication in and out of the Classroom

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My English 1102 class, “Odd Victorian Bodies,” uses the lens of nineteenth-century British literature to study the concepts of multimodal–or WOVEN (written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal)–communication. The class reads Victorian novels, short stories, and poetry that deal explicitly with bodies. In addition to learning about a historical time period,… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 6: Academic Dad

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In this brief episode, Toby attempts to comment on academic parenting (and fatherhood in particular) . . . while academic parenting. His comments are drawn from Aviva Shen’s article on student perception and gender bias, Apoorva Mandavilli’s New York Times piece on representation in academia, Dale Edwin Murray’s Times Higher Education essay on the impossibility… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 5: “The Ferrante Affair”

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In this episode, Toby and I discuss the controversy surrounding the publication of Italian journalist Claudio Gatti’s “Elena Ferrante: An Answer?” and “The Story Behind a Name” in The New York Review of Books this past weekend. Having never read any of Ferrante’s knowledge, we rely quite heavily on Alexandra Schwartz’s analysis in The New… Continue reading