Although undergraduate students must take a fairly wide variety of general education courses, it can become easy over time to overlook the ways different departments and fields interrelate. In an effort to provide a forum in which students and professors can discuss ways their studies correlate, several English department faculty members, including english professor Dr. Jonathan Singleton, hold English Roundtables every Friday at noon in American Studies 314.
Singleton said the roundtables are relaxed and informal, and anyone on campus is welcome to join. According to Singleton, while the roundtables themselves are relatively new, they stem from an older tradition in the English department.
“We have had a program for a long time called ‘What are you Reading?’ that came out of a former faculty member’s practice of asking that question to people on the sidewalk on campus,” Singleton said. “That became sort of legendary, so the department had this once a month get-together where a professor and a student would share a book that they were reading and people would talk about them. A couple of years ago, a couple of faculty members said it would be great to expand this program to get more people from across campus involved.”
Singleton said the main goal is to build an intellectual community between students and professors that connects different fields. During a typical roundtable, Singleton said that one or two people will present on a certain topic, and then will open it up for discussion. These topics have ranged from books people are reading, to the way computer programming relates to literary studies.
Professor of English Dr. Kathy Dillion said the roundtables really began to take off as they began incorporating increasingly diverse and high-interest topics.
“It’s kind of evolving in that last year was the first year, and we thought how great it would be to have this intellectual discussion, but it didn’t get as many people — especially students — as we hoped,” Dillion said. “This year we talked about how we could have more topics that were still substantive but were of more high interest. That just got lots of people and it kind of exploded.”
One such topic, which Dillion said ultimately spilled over into two sessions, was on video games and literature. Dr. Russell Keck, another professor of English in the department, led these sessions. He said it was interesting and exciting to open the floor up to people who study English and are interested in games’ narratives, as well as to others who are computer programmers and have an interest in the games’ more technical sides.
“It’s interesting because it’s not as if you have to hit these certain topics along the way at the roundtables,” Keck said. “It really can end up going somewhere that you had no real expectation for, but that’s interesting. That’s what makes it fun and that’s where that collaborative process can lead to new ideas or discussions that I myself hadn’t thought about.”
Students can find out about upcoming topics by checking flyers posted across campus.
