Guest Speakers

Cathy Birkenstein-Graff
Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago
B.A., Columbia College (Chicago)
M. A., Northwestern University
Ph.D. in English and American Literature, Loyola University of Chicago

In February, 2006 Professor Birkenstein-Graff published a textbook, co-authored with her husband, Professor Gerald Graff, entitled They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (W. W. Norton). With Professor Graff, Professor Birkenstein-Graff has given numerous talks and workshops on writing in recent years, including appearances at Columbia University, University of Rochester, Brandeis University, the University of South Florida, Duke University, Notre Dame, the University of Mississippi, Northern Michigan University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Lawrenceville and St. Andrews Prep Schools. Professor Birkenstein-Graff previously taught literature and composition at Columbia College, De Paul University, and Loyola University. She lives with Professor Graff and their son, Aaron, in Chicago.

Gerald Graff
Professor of English and Education
University of Illinois at Chicago
B.A., University of Chicago
Ph.D. in English and American Literature, Stanford University

Professor Graff previously taught at University of New Mexico and at Northwestern University, where he served as departmental chair and Director of the Northwestern University Press. He subsequently was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English and Education at the University of Chicago. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, he was for three years Dean for Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Arts and Sciences, with a joint appointment in the English department and the College of Education.

Books: Professing Literature: An Institutional History (University of Chicago Press); Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (University of Chicago Press); Literature Against Itself (University of Chicago Press); Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (W. W. Norton). A Reader's Subscription Book Club selection, Beyond the Culture Wars 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. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (Yale University Press), which won the David H. Russell Research Award in 2003 from the National Council of Teachers of English. Editor: Jacques Derrida's Limited Inc (Northwestern University Press), which contains an interview with Derrida. Co-edited works with James Phelan: a Case Study in Critical Controversy edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; a Case Study in Critical Controversy edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Books about his essays and ideas: Teaching the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars, edited by William E. Cain (Garland Press); Falling into Theory, edited by David Richter, preface by Gerald Graff (Bedford Books/St. Martin's Press).

Professor Graff is the co-founder with Gregory Jay of Teachers for a Democratic Culture, an organization aimed at combating conservative misrepresentations of recent changes in the curriculum and the culture. He also was on the Advisory Board of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and contributor to an AACU report, The Challenge of Connected Learning. He is the director and principal designer of the interdisciplinary Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Since December 2005, he has served as Second Vice-President of the Modern Language Association of America, and is slated to become President of the MLA in 2008.

The book They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing grew out of Professor Graff's argument in Clueless in Academe that educational institutions need to do more to close the gap between the culture of public discourse and that of students and other citizens. If there is a unifying thread that runs through his career and his writing, this is it.