public writing

In my professional and other public writing, I write about literature, politics, and higher education. My writing appears in Newsweek, The Atlantic, Vox, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. My first publication for a general audience came about when I made a connection between fake news during the 2016 US presidential election and medieval political prophecy. In my work, I am interested in comparing the past to the present and also in exploring how the past is present in our society, our institutions, and our ideas.

Most of my writing for public audiences has a political edge. The past was bad–unequal, violent, blind to itself–but differently bad from the present. Measuring that difference can help give purpose to ongoing efforts to organize for a better future. Since becoming PhD program director I have contributed an op-ed and a statistical article on English PhD stipends.

English PhD Stipends in the United States: Statistical Report

This report presents the results of research into stipends for PhD candidates in English conducted between summer 2021 and spring 2022. The report surveys the top 135 universities in the U.S. News and World Report 2022 “Best National University Ranking,” plus the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Of these universities, 80 offer a PhD in…

Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?

Last summer I began an endless project: gathering comprehensive, up-to-date information about English Ph.D. stipends around the United States. I wanted to quantify the widespread perception that doctoral candidates are not earning stipends commensurate with their contributions to research, teaching, and service at their universities. To that end, I scrolled through program websites, emailed directors…

The coronavirus time warp

I am reading a poem called Piers Plowman with my undergraduates this semester. It is an apocalyptic dream vision from the fourteenth century. The author, William Langland, lived through the Black Death, which ripped through Eurasia and killed one in three people in England. More than once, Langland refers to the present with the phrase…

Stop calling Trump ‘medieval.’ It’s an insult to the Middle Ages.

Last month, Dana Milbank wrote for the Washington Post that President Trump’s proposed wall along the Mexico–US border was “medieval.” “It’s true,” Trump responded later the same day, “because [a wall] worked then and it works even better now.” CNN’s Jake Tapper mocked Trump’s response on his newscast with a cartoon depicting the president as a medieval European king. Take it from…

Why educate?

In July 2017, a Pew Research Center poll revealed that most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58 percent) believed “colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country.” Meanwhile, a solid majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (72 percent) saw higher education’s effects on the United States as positive. Higher education has become a polarizing…

Why it matters that more Americans read poetry now

In September, the National Endowment for the Arts published surprising new data: poetry reading in the United States has almost doubled over five years. A 2012 NEA survey had found that only 7 percent of Americans had read poetry in the previous year, while the 2017 survey found 12 percent had. The NEA previewed these data in a blog post back in June.…

Exhibition: desegregating Boston’s schools

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court declared separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional (Brown v. Board of Education). The ruling for desegregation provoked significant backlash from white communities and their elected officials across the country for several decades. De facto segregation, where racial concentration across neighborhoods resulted in the schools being…

There is no such thing as ‘the digital humanities’

Timothy Brennan’s “The Digital-Humanities Bust” is the latest in a long line of essays criticizing a new field or approach known as “the digital humanities.” “What exactly have the digital humanities accomplished?” Brennan wants to know. He concludes that “the digital humanities is a wedge separating the humanities from its reason to exist — namely,…

The 13th-century revolution that made modern poetry possible

In the 13th century, English poetry changed dramatically. There were no battles, no pamphleteering, or Ezra Pound-style polemics, and no warring factions. Yet by the end of the century, a poetic revolution had taken place. Modern readers and writers have long since forgotten what happened back then, but poetry today would not be the same…

Did the Middle Ages end?

This question seems to answer itself. By definition, ‘the Middle Ages’ must have ended, or they wouldn’t be ‘the Middle Ages’ in the first place. No one thinks they are living in between two more sophisticated eras. But notice the slippage here, from a period of time to a state of mind. While the Middle…

Millennial bashing in medieval times

As a millennial and a teacher of millennials, I’m growing weary of think pieces blaming my generation for messing everything up. The list of ideas, things and industries that millennials have ruined or are presently ruining is very long: cereal, department stores, the dinner date, gambling, gender equality, golf, lunch, marriage, movies, napkins, soap, the…

Teaching with collaborative digital textbooks

For the past two years I’ve experimented with a new pedagogical tool in my undergraduate courses: collaborative digital textbooks. Using MediaKron, a WYSIWYG website builder developed at Boston College, where I teach, I created companion websites for two undergraduate seminars in medieval English poetry. MediaKron is a proprietary product of the Center for Teaching Excellence at…

History in the future tense

History in the future tense sounds like an oxymoron. Everyone knows that history lives in the past tense. The colloquial or journalistic use of the present tense to narrate past events is known as the historical present. To be recognizable as such, history writing must occupy one of these two grammatical modalities. It was not always so. In…

Petitions and the power of poetry

Is poetry obsolete? As an English professor and a poet, I face this question every day. The death of poetry would put me out of a job. Each year, I teach a required seminar called Studies in Poetry, in which I must convince a new group of Boston College sophomores that poetry matters in the…

Feeling ‘British’

A lot of the excellent new work that has been done on race and racism in the Middle Ages—both in this series and also within academia—focuses either on telling the stories of people of color in the Middle Ages, or understanding how the racial categorizations of people of color came to be. But whiteness, as a…

Poor people, in the abstract

In his farewell address, President Obama called for political solidarity among “blacks and other minority groups” and “the rural poor . . . . but also the middle-aged white guy”. It is only, perhaps, in a farewell address that a president may speak so frankly about race and class. Yet the sentiment was familiar. As he…

Before ‘fake news’ came false prophecy

The revelation that fake news deceived voters in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election generated real outrage in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral victory. The top fake news stories garnered more clicks than the top real news stories on Facebook in the final three months of the campaign season. Fake news and other campaign fantasies…