How to Build a Life in the Humanities (PDF)

Gregory Colón Semenza is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA. He is the author of Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance and, with Laura L. Knoppers, Milton in Popular Culture. He has also published numerous essays on such popular culture topics as Tim Blake Nelson's 'O,' children's versions of Milton's Comus, and Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.

"One of the many good qualities of the essays in this book is that collectively they offer a panorama of humanists' lives. In them every major step in the humanist's career, from graduate school to retirement, comes in for imaginative, sympathetic, and precise description. Even if you are not a humanist especially if you are not a humanist let me urge you to read this book from end to end. Do it, and you will learn a great deal much of it the sort of thing that no polemic could teach you. This is a book I wish I could have read when I was much younger. Nothing like it existed then and nothing like it exists now." - Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University, USA

"This collection of tart, lively essays puts the 'humanity' back into the humanities, and contributes to a robust ongoing conversation on life and lifestyle within the academy. How to Build a Life in the Humanities is an imaginative and valuable book." - Leonard Cassuto, Professor of English, Fordham University, USA and contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education

"This valuable, deeply moving book punctures widely accepted ivory-tower notions of college and university teaching and shows that humanities professors face ongoing pressures - emotional, financial, familial, and social - that make juggling their personal and professional lives extremely complicated and yet, more often than not, unusually fulfilling. Semenza, Sullivan, and the other contributors to this wonderfully multifaceted volume put Life - with a capital 'L' - back into academe." - David S. Reynolds, Distinguished Professor, English & American Studies, CUNY Graduate Center, USA

"In an era when the humanities are widely considered dead in the water, and humanists the out-of-touch eggheads who haven't yet gotten the memo, this candid collection lets tenured (with a couple exceptions) humanities scholars describe the challenges, inspirations, and ambivalences that accompany