A Better Book List: Classic Novels Worth Reading

A Better Book List: Classic Novels Worth Reading

It is a truth universally acknowledged that even book lists with titles like “100 Best Novels” must be incomplete. But what gets left out? And why? Our resident Victorianist takes on The Guardian’s recent “100 Best Novels” list, pointing out its dearth of early women novelists and offering some substitutes. Her favorites? Novels about slave rebellions, Regency scandals and shocking nineteenth-century sensations.

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When You Bring Books to Work, Everyone Wins

When You Bring Books to Work, Everyone Wins

We live in a world with limited resources. For non-profit literacy organizations, that often means choosing between supporting early readers and writers and developing complex literacies in adults. The good news? These aren’t mutually exclusive goals. In celebration of International Literacy Day, we bring three examples that demonstrate one key fact: helping adults grow offers untold benefits to their families, too.

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A Text at Work: Two Poems

A Text at Work: Two Poems

A poem is a beautiful thing, teaching us to see the world differently, ornamenting common sentiments with elegant turns of phrase. For Labor Day, these two poems take a different tack. By stripping down everyday work to its elements, they highlight the beauty in everyday work and workers. Gas station attendants and window cleaners, as much as writers and coders, do meaningful work.

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The End of Summer Reading: Our 5 Favorite Books

The End of Summer Reading: Our 5 Favorite Books

The kids are back in school. Here and there, the trees have begun to change their colors. Though Labor Day is still a week away, summer has reached its end–and so has summer reading. Over the past three months, we’ve all ready deeply both for work and for pleasure–and we each want to share the most provocative texts, old and new, fiction and non-fiction alike, we’ve come across.

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All Who Wander Are Not Lost: Objective-Free Teaching

All Who Wander Are Not Lost: Objective-Free Teaching

Recently, Program and Curriculum Director Jessica Isaac sat down with a group of SUNY-Fredonia professors to talk about their experience with Books@Work. What she learned surprised her. Without the teaching objectives they are required to use in the classroom, these faculty felt adrift, even nervous–at the same time, they were invigorated. Many working in education complain that we live in an age of overassessment. They rarely talk about how assessment can be comforting and comfortable. But is comfort really the mark of a quality educational experience?

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The Public Humanities Can Thrive: 5 Ideas from the MLA

The Public Humanities Can Thrive: 5 Ideas from the MLA

The public humanities are not a top-down approach to culture, wherein, professor-experts are required to offer the public their knowledge. Instead, the humanities are practiced, publicly, when we use the skills we learn from the humanities in public. This special issue, like the MLA panel it developed from, is aimed at humanities professors, and as such it thinks much and specifically about how faculty engage with public humanities projects. The essays offer food for thought for nonprofits and people – PhDs or otherwise – engaging in public humanities work, especially as we foster partnerships with academics and academic institutions. Here are 5 big takeaways from them.

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Hard Conversations

Hard Conversations

I think that hard conversations reveal that we possess a fundamental sense of justice and responsibility and care. Hard conversations show us, experientially, that we are moral beings, and any education worth the name will allow us to reflect upon, and understand, that personal moral core. . . The last thing I would want my students to do is take a purely dispassionate approach to Chris Burden’s self-destructive performance pieces, the systemic, institutional racism and torture found in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, the traumatic historiographic ambitions of the World War II combat film genre, or the extremely graphic murders described in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

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