This article is a reflection of the author's experiences teaching a course titled 'Women In Islam' [WIS] in an English Department at a medium, public, Masters granting, Liberal Arts university in the Midwestern United States. This paper argues for the importance of teaching WIS through a multi-genre, interdisciplinary, and global approach. The…

Colleges and universities looking to recruit leaders from within the faculty ranks will face more and more difficulty. From their respective positions--as a provost (Janel) and a search consultant (Dennis)--they often hear senior executives in higher education say that building a new generation of faculty leaders will be a major challenge in the…

Many teachers have known of (or been members of) departments in which all of the potentially successful chairs--after having proven themselves by running subunits or graduate programs--have decided to devote themselves solely to research or teaching, and to leave department administration to whoever is willing to do it or whoever can be talked…

In this article Sutherland surveys over the period of the last 40 years (the length of an average full academic career) the changes which have occurred to the departmental structures and procedures in the teaching of and research into English Literature in British universities. He perceives a marginalization of the English department in the…

Changing a curriculum is already stressful enough without finding new ways to create anxiety, discontent, and rancor. To provide a truly integrated liberal education, the author contends that educators must not only change their curricula--the courses they offer--but they must change what they do in the classroom, the kinds of papers and…

This essay argues that a trend in histories of literary and writing studies is to bifurcate the origins of the fields and so engage in those modernist narrative fallacies described by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Such works limit our understanding of past practices and the longstanding connections between disciplinarity and labor. (Contains 2 notes.)

2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Naturally, historians are thrilled. But what about their discipline? Why and how might Lincoln matter to English studies? In this article, the authors reflect on Lincoln and his influence on English studies. They argue that Lincoln has played or can play an important role in the college English…

Originally published in a 1984 issue of "College English," Stephen North's article "The Idea of a Writing Center" has over the years been much cited in writing center scholarship. Even so, this scholarship as a whole did not proceed to gain much presence in "CE" and other broadly-oriented composition journals. Reconsidering North's piece, the…

Discusses faculty development and the role of the English department chairperson in that area. (FL)

Notes that the question of whether English departments had a future was asked 17 years ago when the author first became a department chair as it is asked now upon her retirement. Discusses things about the profession that have changed, for good or ill. Suggests that the profession's penchant for self-examination has not changed. (RS)

Discusses the responsibilities of serving as English department head. Two main duties identified are (1) to preserve and expand knowledge and (2) to ensure the success of the educational mission of the department. The administrator is encouraged to maintain scholarly activities while being a student of departmental and institutional affairs. (DF)

Briefly reviews personal experiences as an English department chair and compares the relative advantages of two systems of department administration: long-standing and short-term headships. (AEA)

Describes seven things the author would do, were he chairing an English department, to solve some of the problems that go with the post. (DD)

Promoting academic departmental productivity requires vision, passion, and sensitivity while coping with the rapid pace of change. This paper presents 10 proven strategies for managing some common challenges faced by academic department chairs: (1) building a sense of family purpose; (2) establishing mechanisms to assure accountability; (3)…

Traces the history of the author's experience as the chair of an English department and discusses the leadership required of an effective chair. (DD)