Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. His latest book is Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
Christopher Schaberg
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Writing on Public Books
Pedagogy of the Depressed
“At a certain point, it seemed like all my students were depressed… This was depressing.”
Toward a Cellular Humanities
Are our phones the bane of critical thought? Or might they be our latest texts to read and interpret—objects worthy of inquiry and analysis?
Loving Wilderness, Loving Borders
The Wednesday after the 2016 election, my son, Julien, arrived home from school crying. “Do we have to go home, too?” He had been talking with some of his …
Turning Kids into Capital
One of my pet peeves is when I hear a colleague refer to our students as “kids.” They’re not: they are younger than us, sure, but they are still adults who can go to war, operate giant metal boxes on wheels, make all sorts of weighty decisions, acquire disciplinary knowledge and expertise, and work for […]
Against Careerism, For College
Having just seen a new crop of students graduate from my university, and seeing them now off into the world—to jobs, internships, and further study—I find myself thinking about what college is for, what it results in, and the feelings that swirl around the event of graduation. In the longest single section of David Foster […]
First-Class Reading and Airport Futures
In-flight magazines are the nadir of non-literary writing. How did they come to be a destination for A-list authors? …
Liberal Arts: A Safe Space?
Lydia Davis has a wonderful short story called “Idea for a Sign,” in which she explores the dynamic of social settings where people who don’t know one another must sit side-by-side, as on a train. Davis suggests that it would be easier if everyone wore signs explaining exactly what they will and will not do […]
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking
At Loyola University New Orleans I teach a seminar on David Foster Wallace—a class I designed at the urging of several students. One day late in the semester we were tackling Wallace’s very short story “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Four students in the class immediately and enthusiastically declared that they had read and discussed this […]
