Uploaded May 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
As enrollment in English and history classes at universities falls, literary study has begun to find professional outlets outside of academia. Are the humanities in crisis?
In anticipation of Merve Emre’s forthcoming monograph, Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, join Emre for a discussion about two curious and much-discussed phenomena. On the one hand, veritable crisis within the academy: against a backdrop of program closures, decreasing student enrollments, and budget cuts, the study of English and history at the collegiate level in America has fallen by a third over the last decade. On the other hand, flourishing outside the classroom walls: professional schools in medicine, law, and business have emerged as new sites for literary study and teaching, drawing productive links between reading literature and in-the-world practice. How did this happen? And what will happen next?
Merve Emre is Professor of Criticism at Wesleyan University and Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She is the author and editor of several books, including Paraliterary, The Ferrante Letters, The Personality Brokers, and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, and a contributing writer at the New Yorker. She is working on two books: one on love; the other on the discipline of literary studies.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
As enrollment in English and history classes at universities falls, literary study has begun to find professional outlets outside of academia. Are the humanities in crisis?
In anticipation of Merve Emre’s forthcoming monograph, Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, join Emre for a discussion about two curious and much-discussed phenomena. On the one hand, veritable crisis within the academy: against a backdrop of program closures, decreasing student enrollments, and budget cuts, the study of English and history at the collegiate level in America has fallen by a third over the last decade. On the other hand, flourishing outside the classroom walls: professional schools in medicine, law, and business have emerged as new sites for literary study and teaching, drawing productive links between reading literature and in-the-world practice. How did this happen? And what will happen next?
Merve Emre is Professor of Criticism at Wesleyan University and Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She is the author and editor of several books, including Paraliterary, The Ferrante Letters, The Personality Brokers, and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, and a contributing writer at the New Yorker. She is working on two books: one on love; the other on the discipline of literary studies.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
