A Message from the President

For centuries the book has been the primary vehicle scholars have used to disseminate their work. The Graduate Center plays a significant role in this transmission of knowledge. In 2008 alone, our faculty and alumni published over seventy volumes. In this issue of Folio, we focus on several aspects of The Graduate Center’s relationship with the book. More >

History as a Text to be Read

By approaching history with the skills of a literary scholar, Distinguished Professor David Reynolds brings President Andrew Jackson and his turbulent times to life.

When HarperCollins approached award-winning author David Reynolds about a book on the era of President Andrew Jackson, it struck him as an intriguing prospect. After all, his academic research had focused on this period of American history since his dissertation at Berkeley, and he’d since gone on to write books on major figures of the time, such as the abolitionist John Brown and the poet Walt Whitman. But just as important, he believed that there was a gap in the existing literature – an absence that he could fill. More >

Biography, “the Stepchild of the Academy,”
Comes Into its Own

At The Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography, a popular literary genre is approached with the rigorous standards of scholarship.

Largely because of the perception of biography as a popular form, the university has not traditionally provided a warm reception for faculty members interested in pursuing this type of writing. David Nasaw, Distinguished Professor of History at The Graduate Center, has called the genre “the stepchild of the academy.” He says, “The language of biography is a shared, generalized language, without disciplinary jargon. The academy went through a period of having specialized languages and specialized methodologies. Attempting to write for the general public was frowned upon. I have colleagues who were advised, ‘Make your third book a biography,’ or ‘write one biography, but no more’ if they wanted to be taken seriously as scholars. That’s changing now.” More >

Tricks of the Trade

In Distinguished Professor André Aciman’s Writers’ Institute, editors of some of the nation’s most prestigious publications help talented writers hone their craft and master their profession.

An authority on Marcel Proust, the literature of seventeenth-century France, and a host of other subjects, André Aciman believes in the importance of teaching and has always enjoyed his work as a professor in The Graduate Center’s Comparative Literature and French Programs. Yet in the course of this work, he noticed something. While his students could write in a manner appropriate to a scholarly journal, most seemed at a loss when trying to communicate with a mainstream audience that did not share their particular expertise. And the problem was not limited to budding scholars, but rather seemed commonplace among aspiring writers who wanted to connect with a broad readership of a quarter million or more. More >