Faculty members from British/Irish Literary Studies and American Literary Studies combined their efforts to form a 19th Century Literary Studies group that contributes significantly to research, scholarship, and public/community outreach. Despite its successes, this group is weakening because the individual disciplines (i.e., BILS and ALS) continue to lose teaching faculty. Overall literature faculty continue to research and publish significant works in their disciplines. For example, Gail Houston is finishing her fourth book; Anita Obermeier is writing her third book and is a major re-interpreter of medieval literature in a comparative literature context; Helen Damico has just published a definitive study of Beowulf. Lynn Beene, Marissa Greenburg, Aeron Hunt, and Caroline Woodward are writing and opening more avenues into visual media and literary studies. Gary Scharhorst and Matthew Hofer have just finished their research and editorial work on Oscar Wilde’s interviews and adventures in America. Jesse Alemán also is opening up new visual media areas in not only Chicana/o literature but also in long neglected popular literature. Native American literary studies will be strengthened by Kathleen Washburn’s investigation ‘The Test of Indian Blood and Character”: Writing Indigenous Modernity in the Journals of the Society of American Indians.’
And. although each is only half-time in English, Scarlet Higgins is establishing a strong element of feminist and political studies in American Modernism and Post-modernism; Kadeshia
Matthews will soon see her essay ‘The Problem of Paternity: Frederick Douglass’s Births and the Birth of African American Literature’ in print; and Carmen Nocentelli is awaiting her copy of PMLA in which she has a lead article. These are only a few examples of the professionalism and dedicated research done by the much-diminished faculty in literature. In addition, we celebrate the 2009 publication of the Bedford Anthology of World Literature Compact Edition, along with a teaching guide, and the potential to develop a teacher training program in world literature at UNM. Gary Harrison and (Emeritus) Paul Davis recently gave two workshops on teaching world literature at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and College of Southern Nevada, with another visit to these two institutions again in spring 2009. Gary Harrison aims to submit an NEH Summer Seminar or Institute for College Teachers for Summer 2011 to bring college/university teachers together under the rubric of teaching world literature.
The future vision for the literary studies groups, however, depends in part on funding and, in larger part, on retention of faculty. The University is again facing a 5% rescission in Fall 2009 and a probable further rescission in Spring 2010. Salaries and hiring are frozen, and several faculty in the literary groups are at or close to retirement. American Literary Studies faced this issue and decided several years ago to focus its program on the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Prof. Higgins teaches contemporary American literature but only one semester
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per year. British/Irish Literary Studies, likewise, has spent more than a year reconfiguring its programs to move away from a chronological sequence. Again the choices are difficult and are made all the more challenging by the current economic situation.
At the same time, advanced undergraduate students and graduate students in all programs are asking for more of everything the Department currently offers: more course availability,
especially more upper-division electives, more poetry courses, more Creative Writing courses, more specialized literature and rhetoric courses, more electives, more reading of the classics, more reading of neglected authors, more diversity, more grammar, and more challenge. Graduate students in particular feel neglected when they must take split
undergraduate/graduate courses for most of their degree work. Such classes often end up serving both as an introductory and an advanced course. Pedagogically these courses are difficult to teach and compromise educational integrity. The Department’s best efforts to sequence courses, to educate the many students it serves, to provide close mentoring for Honors’ students and graduate students repeatedly confront daily realities of UNM. The future direction seems to be one of larger enrollments (e.g., 50-100 students in a Shakespeare lecture course with 2-4 TAs grading the students’ work) and online course offerings (frequent now in Core Writing but novel in literary studies).
BILS is currently drafting a guided doctoral concentration in British/Irish studies that would enrich the current options in designated chronological fields. The faculty have also discussed with enthusiasm the thought-provoking areas offered by post-colonial and post-imperial literature, by multicultural investigations of Renaissance literature, and by the
merging/separating of contemporary American and British literary figures, works, and trends. Most of all, the literary faculty join the Creative Writing and Rhetoric & Writing faculty in finding recommendations regarding strategies for allocating faculty, courses, and resources to serve the long-term health of the Department.
The Department currently distributes a monthly newsletter, First Friday News online, but could benefit from improved communication with students (e.g., developing an e-mail list for all majors, minors, and interested students), with alumni (e.g., regular follow-up for outcomes assessment and fund raising), with other institutions (e.g., pursuing cooperative teaching opportunities so students could gain credit for courses at other universities), and with the UNM community (e.g., showing how English’s courses and degree programs complement their own). Such improved communication could come about if staff or reassigned time were available. Despite the many challenges, UNM’s English Department continues to chart and redesign itself for the benefit of its students and its academic communities. We hope for greater disciplinary challenge and specialization for our students, for more thoughtful and informative self-
evaluation, for more collaboration with our UNM peers and our national academic peers. But we are all too aware of the difficulties the state, the University, and the Department face. What we hope will come from this APR are specific, practical, and functional ideas to achieve our academic, pedagogical, and civic goals.
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