Gerald Graff, Professor of English and of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago and President of the MLA
Gerald Graff was born and raised in Chicago, attended public schools, and did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago, taking a B.A. in English in 1959. He attended graduate school at Stanford and received a Ph.D in English and American literature in 1963. After teaching for three years at the University of New Mexico, he moved in 1966 to Northwestern University, where he chaired the English Department for six years, was named to the John C. Shaffer chair, and later served as Director of the Northwestern University Press. In 1991, he moved to the University of Chicago as George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English and Education, a chair previously held by Wayne Booth. In January 2000, Gerald moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago as Associate Dean for Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Arts and Sciences with a joint appointment in English and the College of Education. He served for three years in the Dean’s office working with Stanley Fish, with responsibilities that included curricular development in the College of Arts and Sciences and high school teacher education.
In fall 2007, he will become Co-director (with Cathy Birkenstein-Graff) of the newly-established Writing in the Disciplines Program in UIC’s College of Arts and Sciences.
A Guggenheim Fellowship led to Gerald’s 1987 book, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (U Chicago P), now a standard work on the history of academic literary studies in America. In 1994-95 he was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on the Stanford University campus. His earlier books include Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (Northwestern UP 1970; reprinted 1980, U Chicago P) and Literature Against Itself (U Chicago P 1979; reprinted 1995 Ivan Dee Inc.). He is the editor of Jacques Derrida's Limited Inc (Northwestern UP, 1989), which contains a lengthy interview with Derrida by Gerald.
In November 1992, W. W. Norton published Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. In this book and numerous articles, Graff developed the idea of “teaching the conflicts,” urging the productive use of controversy in classrooms to make intellectual work more coherent, interesting, and accessible to students. A Reader's Subscription Book Club selection, the book won a 1992 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the 1992-93 Frederic W. Ness Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Graff’s teach-the-conflicts pedagogy has been the theme of several academic conferences, including ones at Bard College in March 1998 and at UCLA in April 1998. A session on this pedagogy, "Conflicts, Culture Wars, Curriculum: A Roundtable on Gerald Graff," was held at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in December, 2001, with the papers subsequently published in 2003 in Pedagogy.
In 1993, Garland Press published Teaching the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars, a collection of essays on Gerald’s educational ideas edited by William E. Cain of Wellesley College. In the same year, Bedford Books of St. Martin's published a textbook, Falling into Theory, edited by David Richter, with a preface by Gerald, which applies Gerald’s ideas to recent debates over literary theory, A 1995 textbook co-edited by Gerald and James Phelan, a "Case Study in Critical Controversy" edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, presents students with critical debates about the novel, including recent ones over charges of racism and whether the book should be taught in high schools. A second textbook in this “Critical Controversy” series, an edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest also co-edited by Gerald and Phelan, appeared in 2000. All three of these texts, which exemplify the “teaching the conflicts” approach, have gained wide use in college courses.
In 1991 with Gregory Jay, Gerald founded Teachers for a Democratic Culture, an organization aimed at combatting what they saw as conservative misrepresentations of recent changes in the curriculum and the culture. Gerald has lectured or consulted on curricular issues at over two hundred and fifty colleges and universities. In the 1980s he served on the Advisory Board of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and contributed to an AACU report, The Challenge of Connected Learning.
In 1996 Gerald became Director and principal designer of the interdisciplinary Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH) at the University of Chicago.
Through his work in this program, which attracted high school teachers, he became active in secondary school education, developing a project in 1997-98 in which he networked a unit on critical controversies over Shakespeare in one of his college courses at Chicago with courses at several Chicago area high schools. His published account of this project makes a case for broadening the use of such high-school/college collaboration. In the summer of 1999, Graff offered a summer workshop for high school and college teachers at the University of Hartford as the Harry Jack Gray visiting professor.
In 2003, with the support of a grant from the Spencer Foundation, Graff I published Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (Yale UP). The book won the David H. Russell Research Award for 2003 from the National Council of Teachers of English, honorable mention for the MLA Mina Shaughnessy Prize in 2004, and it was the subject of a session—"Debating Graff's Clueless in Academe"—at the 2004 MLA convention.
In December 2005, Graff was elected Second Vice-President of the Modern Language Association of America, thereby becoming President of the MLA in 2008.
In 2006, with Cathy as co-author, Graff published "They Say/I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, from W. W. Norton. This book, which has sold some 70,000 copies in its first year, is an attempt to directly address the problem discussed in Clueless in Academe of closing the gap between academic intellectual culture and that of students and other citizens. If there is a unifying thread that runs through Graff’s career and his writing, this is it.
Contact: ggraff[at]uic.edu