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My Spring 2018 Courses
ENGL 161 CRN 14458 – TR 9:30-10:45 CRN 14460 – TR 3:30-4:45 Everything By Design: Writing About Chicago’s Infrastructure Infrastructure is all around you. The roads you drive to work or school, the...
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Director’s Corner (NeMLA Blog Post #22)
UIC East Campus Quad (photo by John Casey) Greetings from Chicago! After an extended period of warm weather, fall has made its appearance in the upper midwest. It’s now the tenth week of the fall...
View ArticleReview: Chicago Renaissance by Liesl Olson
Ask someone what comes to mind when they think of Chicago literature and they are bound to resurrect the usual suspects such as Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Nelson Algren. They might throw in...
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Director’s Corner (NeMLA Blog Post #23)
View Outside My Classroom Window. February 22, 2018. Photo by John Casey. Greetings from Chicago! Looking at my list of Blog Posts, I see that it has been since October that I’ve last written anything...
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Being Poor on Campus
I know what it’s like to be part of the working poor. I’ve worked as an adjunct (part-time faculty) for many years at multiple schools and as a full time non-tenure track professor for almost 8 years....
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Dear College Professor: On Your Incoming Students
Welcome to Pedagogy & American Literary Studies PALS is thrilled to have a guest post by Clay Zuba, a teacher at Xavier College Preparatory High School in Phoenix, Arizona. Zuba writes about his...
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Redefining Nature in a Post-Wilderness World
Review: Emma Marris. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. “When conservationists focus on ‘pristine wilderness’ only, they give people the impression...
View ArticleNeMLA CFP (2019) Landscape and Immigration in the Long-Nineteenth-Century...
In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Hector St. John De Crèvecoueur asserted that “Men are like plants; the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in...
View ArticleNeMLA CFP (2019) Teaching American Literature as Post-Colonial Literature...
Efforts have been underway for nearly a generation to change the way that scholars, students, and the general public view “American Literature.” To a large extent, these efforts have been additive in...
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A Course in Criticism and Theory
Introduction: More than a handbook but not quite a textbook. That’s probably the best way to describe what follows these opening remarks. Throughout my career as an English Professor, I have been...
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My Spring 2018 Courses (Literature)
Town and Country–Literature About Urban and Rural Life In the United States ENGL 109 Spring 2018 CRN # (24546 / 22523) MWF 2:00-2:50 pm Photo by John Casey (2018) From the urban campus of UIC, it is...
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My Spring Courses 2018 (Rhetoric/Composition)
Everything By Design–Writing About Chicago’s Infrastructure ENGL 161 Spring 2018 MWF 11-11:50 am (32287) MWF 12-12:50 pm (14454) Photo Courtesy of John Casey (2018) Infrastructure is all around you....
View ArticleThey Shall All be Colourized
In the Director’s commentary following his documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson comments that he made the film as a “non-historian for non-historians.” Jackson is correct in making this...
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Out on the Crab Grass Frontier
Today is my first full day back home in Chicago after traveling to NeMLA 19 in Washington, D.C. Or rather National Harbor, a strange outpost of D.C. that I’ll be talking about more momentarily. My wife...
View ArticleThe Problem With Wilderness
“I knew I must be nearing your woodland retreat when the Golden Pheasant lunchroom came into view—Sealtest ice cream, toasted sandwiches, hot frankfurters, waffles, tonics, and lunches. Were I the...
View Article“My Freedom Tastes Different From Yours”: A Review of Benjamin Cooper’s...
Benjamin Cooper, Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship From Revolution to Reconstruction, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. Paper. ISBN: 9781625343314. $27.95....
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March 13, 2020 or The Day Everything Changed
Note: the photo above was taken from my office not long before I left it on March 13, 2020. We knew that week that something big was on the horizon. Faculty had been told earlier in the week to...
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