Composition: History & Theory: 1980 - 1989
Gerald Graff
Description
The Department of English at the University of Chicago considers Gerald Graff to be “one of his generation’s most influential commentators on education, not only as a historian and a theorist, but also through his impact on the classroom practice of teachers.” They attribute this to the main argument of Professing Literature (1987), an argument carried throughout Graff’s work which states that “schools and colleges should respond to curricular and disciplinary conflicts by ‘teaching the conflicts,’ incorporating debates, for example, about literature, history, and how these fields should be studied into courses themselves.” Graff, on his faculty website, considers himself to be a revolutionary with a heart of gold—bent on building bridges between secondary and post-secondary institutions and stirring up controversy in the English Department. After outlining his youth in Chicago, his Ph.D. at Stanford, and minor details about the Guggenheim Fellowship that gave him the means to write Professing Literature, he shares information about founding “Teachers for a Democratic Culture”, “an organization aimed at combating conservative misrepresentations…of recent changes to the curriculum and the culture” with Gregory Jay in 1991.
Basic Facts: Gerald Graff is currently (2009) Professor of English and Education, University of Chicago Illinois. Graff is a Chicago native (no information is available about whether he prefers the Sox or the Cubs). He edited Jacques Derrida’s Limited Inc which, Graff writes, “contains an interview by me with Derrida that clarifies his major ideas”—that’s a pretty impressive feat to claim by itself…He has lectured at over 200 universities since the 1980s. His textbook “They Say/I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (written with his wife Cathy Birkenstein) has “set records for sales” in college and high school since its release in 2006. He was named President of the Modern Languages Association in 2008.
Date of Upload
3/14/09