Anna Kornbluh in Recent Chronicle Piece on the MLA
Associate Professor and Associate Head Anna Kornbluh was featured recently in The Chronicle's "Hanging Out--and Hanging On--At The MLA," in which a group of literary scholars at the recent MLA conference in Seattle were interviewed about their views of the discipline and visions for its future.
Kornbluh was joined in conversation by Edgar Garcia, assistant professor at the University of Chicago; Jonathan Kramnick, a professor at Yale University; Sheila Liming, an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota; and Jeanne-Marie Jackson, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University, as well as Maximillian Alvarez and Len Gutkin, the interviewers.
Among other things, Kornbluh offered the following during the spirited back-and-forth on the topic of where faculty can have an impact in the functioning of the university: "I actually don’t see any of [my duties as Associate Head] as profoundly in contradiction with my research, because I’m a formalist, and I think about how things are put together." Service to one's department, she continued, is often seen "as not intellectual. Building a curriculum, inventing a gen-ed curriculum: Those are profoundly intellectual things. So one wants to be careful of upholding that divide."