The academic field of English literature is disappearing for lack of workers:  fewer students are declaring English as a major, causing literature faculty to pick up work in other disciplines.  But perhaps our field is merely going through a fallow phase.  Maybe we are being called to push aside, for the time being, our books

Since the water crisis hit Flint, researchers and journalists have tried to tell Flint’s story. Outsiders have capitalized in one way or another off the tragedy that effected the city’s people. Due to many stories revolving around Flint and its misfortunes, researchers and reporters have sent out a message that plagues Flint with a bad

No one was making me go to church when I returned except, perhaps, John Milton, the English poet, revolutionary, and blind composer of Paradise Lost. I had been an undergrad at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and was nearing the end of a Ph.D. at Boston College—another Jesuit school to round off my Catholic

Saturday, February, 23, 2013: a group of nearly seventy UM-Flint students and their guests headed south to Ann Arbor, MI, to take in two Shakespeare plays performed by Propeller, an all-male theater company from England. The 2pm performance of Twelfth Night and the 7:30pm Taming of the Shrew were both wonderful examples of how well

            In Love’s Labor’s Lost, an early comedy by William Shakespeare that, like so many of his plays, is peopled with highly literate characters (“bookmen”) and illiterate “clowns” who say of the Latin sprinkled language of their social betters:  “They have been at a great feast of languages, and stol’n the scraps.”  Many of Shakespeare’s

             I am teaching a course in the poetry of Edmund Spenser and John Milton to students at the University of Michigan-Flint.  The course attempts to expose students to the idea that the English literary tradition was built by pens and heads sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions, and having

            I have always loved the early-modern use of the word “mysterie” to denote “a craft, art, trade, or profession.”  It is, in fact, the second definition of the word in the OED where we learn that it began life describing ministerial occupations like the priesthood (Chaucer), matured through use to include all trades—hangman included

In Defense of the Humanities The graduate with a science degree asks, “Why does it work?” The graduate with an engineering degree asks, “How does it work?” The graduate with a management degree asks, “How much will it cost?” The graduate with an arts degree asks, “Do you want fries with that?” For humanities majors,