May 17-18, 2025: What’s Next

Following up the week’s semester reflections series, here are a few upcoming things—teaching-wise and otherwise—I’m looking forward to!

1)      A Return to Honors Lit: I’ve got lots of upcoming classes of course, including one over the summer (a quick version of American Lit II) and the usual balance of things in the Fall (a couple First-Year Writings and another Am Lit II, for example). But one for the Fall semester for which I’m especially excited is my return to our Honors Literature Seminar, after a number of years where other folks have taught that course. I gave brief thought to reinventing the syllabus a bit (something we should always at least consider I believe), but at the end of the day I can’t imagine a more relevant Fall 2025 subject than America in the Gilded Age, and I’m really excited to work with another group of our amazing Honors students to read and discuss and analyze literary, cultural, and historical texts from that all-too-familiar era.

2)      A Public Scholarly Website: When it comes to my own scholarly work, I remain uncertain about when and whether I’ll return to book-length projects, at least in writing—I’m definitely interested in another “season” of my podcast, as I discussed in that post (and for which I’d still love suggestions!). But I’m also excited about another scholarly project, one my wife and I have begun discussing: creating a public scholarly website that can host each of our work in multiple forms, but also and especially serve as a community that can both share others’ existing work and offer folks a place where they can create and publish new work. Much more on that to follow, but please let me know, here or by email, if you have interest, ideas, anything you’d like to contribute to that evolving conversation!

3)      Two Sons in College!: Do I need to say more?! Actually, I definitely do, but I’m drafting this post before we have a definite answer about where my younger son Kyle will end up, and I’ll add a further note once that’s settled. But what I can say no matter what is that, sad as the thought makes me in some ways of course, I’m also really excited to have both boys be part of these communities and conversations, and to be able to share here all the places their education and lives take them.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What’s coming up for you?

May 16, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: Student Tributes to Dad

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

I did teach one other course this semester, an Accelerated Online section of The Short Story that started after Spring Break. But in lieu of a post focused on that class, I wanted to use this last post in the series to highlight a few Bluesky threads where folks—many of them former students—shared tributes to my Dad.

This original one: https://bsky.app/profile/americanstudier.bsky.social/post/3ljgoh56ixk2y

This follow-up: https://bsky.app/profile/americanstudier.bsky.social/post/3ljkjgk2xbs2b

and this one from his former grad student Ryan Cordell: https://bsky.app/profile/ryancordell.org/post/3ljgpguto3224

He was loved, as much as a teacher and mentor as he was as a husband, father, grandfather, and man.

Preview post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 15, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: Graduate Research Methods

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

This semester featured my first-ever section of our Graduate Research Methods course, but I did model that new syllabus on two courses I’ve taught a number of times: Intro to Literary Theory (another Grad class) and Approaches to English Studies (an undergrad one). Which meant we talked here and there about the approach/theory known as psychoanalytical, an approach that defined my Dad’s early career (his dissertation/first book was a psychoanalytical reading of James Fenimore Cooper) and that continued to inform his later interests in topics like authorship. I’ll admit to being far less of a devotee of this approach than my Dad, but I’ll also admit that when we returned fully to this class’s conversations after his passing, I made sure to think through when and how psychoanalytical analysis could help, beyond what I would have been likely to do in another semester. For example, I think Dad’s ideas about the anxieties of authorship and audience have a lot to tell us about Langston Hughes, the poet on whom our middle unit in this course focused. I promise to keep an open mind about this theoretical approach going forward, Dad.

Last reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 14, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: First-Year Writing II

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

I’m sure my Dad taught First-Year Writing in his early years at the University of Virginia, but because of the way that institution and English Department work, overall and in terms of seniority and so on, I believe it had been many many years since he had done so (he taught at Uva for 45 years, so I do mean many many!). As a result, I certainly connect my Literature courses and teaching to him more fully than I do my Writing sections (which I have at least one of, and often as this semester two of, every semester). But when I returned to my FYW classrooms on the Thursday of the week he passed, I had the chance to pay an overt tribute to my Dad and his work: as part of a unit on analyzing multimedia texts we read a Matthew Zoller Seitz article on the “Magical Negro” stereotype, and so I got to share with the students my Dad’s excellent analysis of “Tomming” as both a precursor to that stereotype and a way to analyze it in cultural works. And then we watched the Key & Peele sketch “Magical Negro Fight,” because it’s very relevant to that conversation but also because my Dad really loved all things Key & Peele. I can’t say exactly which of these moments felt most linked to my Dad, because in truth they all were, thoughtfully and humorously and movingly.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 13, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: American Literature II

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

Continuing the thread from yesterday’s post, the other class I taught on that Monday morning was American Literature II, the second-half American Lit survey. That day we were located close in time to Langston Hughes, amidst our Unit on Modernism and the Early 20^th Century, and specifically were on day three (of four) with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (we also briefly added in a supplemental text, Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands,” as we often do in a survey course). That discussion covered a number of turning points in the novel, including the extended flashback in Chapter VI where Nick Carraway narrates the moment when young James Gatz abandons his prior self and heritage to create the new identity of Jay Gatsby. And as we talked about it, I couldn’t help remembering one of the (many) arguments my Dad and I have had about literature over the decades, in this case about whether Gatz’s parents/heritage are implied to be ethnic (read: non-white) in any way. My Dad thought no, I thought yes; as usual I don’t know that I shifted his perspective at all, but as always I know that the debate sharpened my own reading and analysis. Not sure there’s much in my ideas that he didn’t contribute to one way or another!

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 12, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: Major American Authors of the 20th Century

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

We lost my Dad on a Sunday morning; on Monday morning, I taught two American Literature courses over Google Meet. I hope that doesn’t seem insensitive or unfeeling; I assure you it was quite the opposite, not least because I was teaching at my Dad’s desk in his study, with his books and papers and so much else of his amazing career and life around me. In Major American we were beginning our second week with Langston Hughes, and discussing in particular his stunning book-length poem/collection “Montage of a Dream Deferred” (1951). At the heart of that collection, in its literal center but also I would argue its philosophical core, is “Theme for English B,” one of Hughes’s most explicitly autobiographical poems and a text focused on an English classroom and assignment. As we talked about “Theme” during that class, and especially as I reflected for a bit on the limits and the possibilities of teaching and writing alike before we move to another focal text, I certainly felt like my Dad, a lifelong writer and teacher and critical optimist about all things literary, was there in the conversation with us.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 10-11, 2025: A Works Progress Administration for the 21st Century

[On May 6^th, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of WPA histories, leading up to this weekend post on why we need a 21^st century revival!]

I’m not gonna lie, I planned the main focal points for this series long ago, before the start of the new Trump administration (another inside baseball blog detail)—and given that the new administration’s #1 priority has been cutting federal jobs and programs and departments, it seems beyond silly to even suggest something like a Works Progress Administration in 2025.

But here’s the thing: I’ve spent a good bit of the last decade-plus of my career arguing that we can’t cede concepts, ideas, ideals over to the MAGA types. Not patriotism, not America, and, yes, not federal workers. So there’s no way I’m gonna let Elon Musk, his DOGE lackeys, and the ostensible President dictate how we think about federal workers and programs in any way, much less in the worst possible ways that they’ve been arguing for in both words and actions over the last few months. Not when we’ve got so many models of the best of federal workers and of America through them, with the WPA a whole host of prime examples.

So yes, I deeply believe we need a new WPA for the 21^st century. The fact that we most definitely will not get it during this administration only makes me more certain that we need to argue and fight for it, and all such ideas that represent our highest ideals, moving forward.

Semester reflections series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?