April Newsletter

Exceptional Undergraduate Learning

April 2025

We are entering a period where we will continue to grow while other institutions contract. And while we will be unlikely to hire at the same pace as we have through the first half of the decade, we will certainly still welcome enough new colleagues between now and 2030 to continue to reshape the academy. I hope we will not, behind discussions of “fit,” decide to seek only people who will reinforce disciplinary orthodoxies, whether those are old or new.

WHAT I’M READING Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood. Riverhead Books, 2025.

Over the past twenty-five years, Australian Charlotte Wood has published seven novels, but this latest, nominated for a Booker Prize, is now making a splash upon its belated distribution throughout North America. The narrator, an atheist in late middle age, takes refuge from her unfulfilled urban life by moving to a convent near where she grew up. Wood’s eye for the commonplace brings alive a daily routine far from my own experience, and the three central occurrences of the plot— an almost-comical infestation of mice, the repatriation of the body of a nun who may have been murdered, and the arrival of a now-famous woman bullied by the narrator when they were in school—drives forward a story that is thoughtful but never ponderous.

How To Be Avant-Garde , by Morgan Falconer. Norton, 2025. When I was publishing on inter-war art a generation ago, Franco American critic George Steiner asked me, “Is there anything new to say?” (It was more encouraging than it sounds.) The lesson is that there is always a new audience to reach and a new tack to take, and Morgan Falconer uses the platform of a book with a major publisher to find antecedents to dada and surrealism, connect the iconoclastic impulse of that art to work in Russia and, most critically, trace its legacy in the post-war thought of Guy Debord. I went to school with a guy who read Debord and whose unfinished thesis, appropriately, was on “silence.” This book unlocks Debord’s legacy for a wider audience than my classmate certainly imagined.