I value the eclecticism of our current faculty and curriculum.  There seems to be a strong will in the program to have a variety of periods, approaches, and geographical regions represented in our curriculum, events, and hiring/ appointment priorities.  I don’t see a need for us to converge around a single area of curricular, geographical, or theoretical strength because this would exclude many people doing great work of all kinds.  At the same time, I feel the urgency for us to converge on some trans-temporal areas of mutual interest, dialogue, and cross-fertilization and to build common program culture beyond our area groups.  Here are a few areas of inquiry that might bring us together in a collective conversation (obviously these are just starting points):

Genre and Form:  In keeping with the “new formalisms” and renewed interest in aesthetic questions in our discipline,  “genre and form” would encompass not only fresh approaches to traditional literary genres, but also popular culture, life writing and emergent genres like the graphic novel or ARGs.

Archive/ Recovery:  There is already huge energy in the program around the study of non-canonical texts, and an upsurge of editing and recovery practice.  We should build on this, and nurture it more.

Embodiment/ bodies and politics: Many people in our program do cutting-edge work on gender and sexuality, critical race theory, social class, disability and cognitive approaches—and this strand would allow us to work across periods on embodied “selfhood,” and embodied difference.

“Outward-facing” scholarship:  I see this strand as about nurturing scholarship that “radiates out” into the world outside the academy.  It obviously includes the Digital Humanities, and has at its core the idea of the “scholar-teacher”— and also scholar-activists, scholar-novelists, scholar-performers, scholar-poets and scholar-artists.

Cross-temporal strands like these could inspire student and faculty reading groups, colloquia, Friday Forum series, works in progress groups and conferences.  And I could see these strands as a great way to represent ourselves in the wider scholarly world and to prospective students.

So…what should we do about the current area group organization?  I am getting a sense that the area groups are not working as well as they should.  At minimum the area groups should be examined to make sure that they respond to our contemporary sense of the profession (I definitely see this concern in the open letters thus far).  It’s a little bit tricky, because the profession itself still defines applicants by chronological field–in the job market and in terms of applications to grad school.  And I worry about getting rid of chronologically-based fields altogether, because I am sensitive to the fact that such a move can often mean “doing away” with earlier periods in the curriculum (I see this concern in the open letters to date as well).  Some of the area groups are doing amazingly well and are functioning seamlessly and productively together…I would not want to ruin their magic.  Yet several of the applicants to our program in recent years, as well as many current students,  have indeed defined themselves in ways that challenge chronological periodization, and I continue to think of the GC as a good place for these students.

In terms of hiring and appointments, I think we should strive for a system where we alternate between hiring/ appointing in chronological fields and hiring and appointing scholars whose work does not “fit” into a conventional field or area.

I am, like many contributors here, concerned about the extreme overwork of college-based faculty and the lack of compensation for serving on dissertation committees, program committees etc.  And I hope we can maintain the consortial system and have college-based faculty teach regularly in our program…to allow for college faculty to serve as effective mentors for our students.  College faculty carry a very significant burden of service to the program, and if the consortial system is eroded I cannot imagine that the level of dedication that college faculty offer to program committees and dissertation committees will be sustainable at the level it is now.

Finally…I am struck (and not in a happy way) by how people use the noun phrase “the program.”  People frequently say: “the program should do x, y or z,” or “the problem with the program is [fill in the blanks].”  Could people be a bit more specific here?  Who is actually “the program”?  By  “the program,” are you referring to program administrators?  The faculty?  Not to downplay the leadership responsibilities of program administrators and program faculty–those are profound and without limit–but at the end of the day, aren’t we all “the program?”

I really like it when people talk about “the program” to refer to our collective work and community–everything we are doing and have yet to do.