Rachel S. Buurma and Laura Heffernan, "The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Listen to this interview of Rachel Sagner Buurma (associate professor of English literature at Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (associate professor of English at the University of North Florida). We talk about there book The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and the great figures of English Studies--the professors and the students. Laura Heffernan : "There is this real sense right now that the ability to read carefully, to learn how to think critically, to learn how to write well, and to conceive of those things as part of a larger life is under threat for the majority of American students. And one of the things our book really tries to do is to recover just how many of those students have participated in the making of English Studies, a discipline which is now being taking away from students, essentially. And so, our intellectual histories need really now to incorporate the institutions where such majors in the humanities are under threat and show, in really material ways as we do, that those students at those schools helped to make some of the core concepts and methods in the humanities." Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.