Faculty Interview Project
English 500

Final Project: As a graduate student, you will eventually be writing a thesis or a capstone project, and the faculty members you work with will be huge influences on your work here and, potentially, your future intellectual life. The goal of this assignment is to help you make connections with the graduate faculty, learn about their work, and better understand a particular speciality in English Studies.

Assignment: This final project is made up of several tasks and asks you to produce a number of distinct documents. Here is an overview:

1. Meet with a professor in the English department with whom you are not currently taking class. Ideally, this should be a professor who works in a field you are interested in better understanding. Introduce yourself via an email and then set up a meeting. You might want to have an initial chat with several different professors before you decide on an interview subject.

2. Conduct a formal, digitally recorded interview with a professor about their field, its history, major questions, objects of study, critical and theoretical methodologies, key figures, journals, etc. How do all these inform their own work? Using your recording and your notes, write a summary that highlights the most important things you learned from the interview.

3. Read one article or book chapter written by this professor and write a summary it.

4. Read one of the most important articles or book chapters in the field recommended to you by the professor, and then write a summary of it.

Strategies: The first step here is meeting the graduate faculty in English. Stop by office hours and chat with professors working in fields that interest you. Try to meet faculty members you are not currently taking courses with, and use this opportunity to introduce yourself.

Prepare for your interview. Be sure to have a series of questions, and make sure you have what you need to record it. If you do not have a smart phone or laptop with a good recording app, you can get access to very good recording equipment through the Digital Commons at the Malpass library.

Be sure to ask the professor which of their articles or book chapters would be most useful for you to read.

Be sure to get an early start on reading the monograph, and take good notes as you read. Those notes will be invaluable when you write the summary.

Final Submission: Your final project should include the following:

• summary of your interview (4-8 pages)

• summary of the professor's article (2-3 pages).

• summary of the important article (4-8 pages).

Format: All your final work should both be neatly typed, printed single-sided, and use an elegant serif font (Times New Roman or Garamond are ideal). You should rigorously follow all MLA style guidelines for research papers, including page numbering, margins, paragraph spacing, and use in-text citation. The works cited list must be properly formatted, and the entire paper must be double spaced.