English Over Time: Changing Vocations of Literature

This second Emeritus College Series at Green College event of the year will feature English scholars in various stages of their career in a conversation about their perspectives on the history and development of their discipline. Discussion will be opened at an early stage to members of the audience.

The playfully titled "English Over Time: Changing Vocations of Literature" invites readers to construe the gerundive subjectively or objectively as they choose, and so—if they choose—of changing their lives in English as many times as they like.

This series will bring together scholars who inhabit the same academic discipline or field of study, and are at different stages of their careers, to talk about how the boundaries separating their field of specialization from other fields have changed over time. The conversation will inevitably lead to a consideration of cross-disciplinary influences and interdisciplinary trends, as participants account for changes in the cognitive strength of sub-disciplines and the rise and fall of disciplinary paradigms. The intent will be to identify underlying reasons for the observed changes and, by the end of the series, to draw some general conclusions about mechanisms of (inter)disciplinary interaction and development, in the spirit—if not necessarily the style—of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault.