On December 2nd, the English Department welcomed guest speakers to “Careers in Teaching,” a conference designed to inform graduate students about career possibilities in independent high schools and community colleges. The day was attended by more than 60 people from 15 different Stanford departments, including English, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), biology, anthropology, the school of education, and earth sciences. The occasion was full of energy and optimism. Capturing in a word the spirit of the event, Eric Chandler of the Kent Denver School described it as "inspiring."
The panelists came from some of the best private schools and community colleges in the country, including the Branson School in Marin County, the Castilleja School in Palo Alto, the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Horace Mann in New York, Kent Denver in Colorado, and the Menlo School in Menlo Park. They also included the president of the Association of Departments of English, Tom Hurley, and Jonathan Ball, the director of school services for the leading independent school recruitment firm, Carney, Sandoe, & Associates in Boston.
In the first session, Stanford Ph.D. alumni spoke frankly about the deliberations that led them to their current positions. In the second, four panelists, all with Ph.D.s in the humanities, explained the day-to-day experience of teaching in an independent school or community college. The third session focused on logistical matters, providing insight into how to apply and make oneself competitive for such positions. All of the panels involved full and vibrant discussion sessions. The participants were also able to speak with the panelists at greater length during the afternoon “breakout” session.
"Careers in Teaching" was funded by a SCORE grant from the Vice Provost for Graduate Education.
Video of the conference is available on the conference website under the "Pages" section of the right sidebar: http://careersinteaching.stanford.edu
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Why did Queen Elizabeth I compare herself with her disastrous ancestor Richard II? Why would Ben Jonson transform Queen Anne and her ladies into Amazons as entertainment for the pacifist King James? How do the concepts of costume as high fashion and as self-fashioning, as disguise and as the very essence of theatre, relate to one other? How do portraits of poets help create the author that readers want, and why should books, the embodiment of the word, be illustrated at all? What conventions connect image to text, and what impulses generated the great art collections of the early seventeenth century?
In this richly illustrated collection on theatre, books, art and personal style, literary critic and cultural historian Stephen Orgel addresses himself to such questions in order to reflect generally on early modern representation and, in the largest sense, early modern performance. As wide-ranging as they are perceptive, the essays deal with Shakespeare, Jonson and Milton, with Renaissance magic and Renaissance costume, with books and book illustration, art collecting and mythography. All are recent, and five are hitherto unpublished.
"A learned and well-written book about the philosophy of imagination and the late-medieval practice of devotional meditation. Karnes's argument is powerful and convincing, and makes a valuable addition to a lively field in current medieval studies."
(Nicholas Watson, Harvard University)
"Michelle Karnes has given us a book of deep learning, lucidity, and intelligence. It reveals the learned origins and the intellectual cogency of meditative forms long thought simplifying and popularizing, and explains why minds of the first rank cultivated them. Never before has medieval devotional literature seemed so smart as Karnes shows it to be. In a single graceful arc, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages sweeps away a conventional account of late-medieval religious writing and supplies what we need to build a better one."
(Steven Justice, University of California, Berkeley)
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo12046435.html
John and George Keats—Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John’s words—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George’s 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet’s most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise Gigante’s account of this emigration places John’s life and work in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers, while revealing the emotional turmoil at the heart of some of the most lasting verse in English.
http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/
Each June the ADE (Association of Departments of English) arranges two seminars where chairs of ADE-member departments share information and consult about issues facing their departments and the field. In 2011, Stanford's English Department Chair Jennifer Summit hosted the Seminar West.
The seminar also features a workshop for new chairs, led by two seasoned administrators, where those about to start or just completing their first year as department chairs can glean practical advice and have questions answered about all aspects of chairing.
Directors of graduate studies attend Seminar West, where a preseminar workshop and sessions devoted to their concerns take place.
. . . Broadly put, the digital humanities is the nexus between computing and the humanities. Matthew Jockers, a Stanford English lecturer, academic technology specialist and co-organizer, describes the field as divided into two strands: those who study "digital objects" using traditional means – for example, studying the history of videogames; and those who are using computational analysis to do text analysis and text mining.
W. Simone Di Piero is a poet, essayist, and translator. Euripides' lyrical, seldom-performed play Ion is a snapshot from an earlier life for the acclaimed poet – the time he was a freelancer way back in the 1970s. Di Piero eventually became a professor as well as a Guggenheim and NEA-awarded poet, and gave up the vicissitudes of freelance living. Ion was his first and last attempt to translate from the Greek. He has been writing and teaching in Stanford's Creative Writing program since 1982.
His latest book of poems is Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems (2007). The most recent collections of essays are City Dog (2009), and When Can I See You Again? (2010). For the poet, who grew up in an Italian working class in Philadelphia, his more usual translation ventures are from the Italian – including acclaimed volumes of Giacomo Leopardi's Pensieri and the poems of 20th century poets Sandro Penna and Leonardo Sinisgalli.
The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium
"Re-imagining the truths we hold to be self-evident and writing with discernment, cogency, and wit, Michele Elam poses the question of the color line for the twenty-first century--'What line?'--across a dazzling array of media and genres." -- Joseph Roach, Yale University
During frequent trips to London, English Professor Martin Evans spent many days searching for houses, apartments, pubs and other buildings associated with literary figures. This interest led him to create a website, Authorial London, which puts authors' lives in cultural context.
ARNOLD RAMPERSAD, the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, has been awarded a National Humanities Medal. The medals were presented by President Obama on March 2, 2011 during a White House ceremony. Rampersad, whose award-winning books have profiled W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson and Ralph Ellison, was cited for his work as a biographer and literary critic.