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2022-2023 Co-Teaching Fellows

2022-2023 Co-Teaching Fellows​

Alan Juffs Linguistics
 
Alan Juffs is Professor in the Department of Linguistics. He was the Director of the English Language Institute at the University of Pittsburgh from 1998-2020. Originally from the United Kingdom, he has lived and taught in France, China (Hunan Province), Japan, and Canada. His research interests include links between semantics and syntax, second language acquisition and teaching, and corpus linguistics. He has published in a variety of scholarly journals and has written books on the lexicon, sentence processing, and language development in Intensive English Programs. He enjoys hiking in the wonderful natural areas of western Pennsylvania and wherever he can escape from a city.
 

William Scott Literature

William Scott’s research and teaching focus on American Literature, African American Literature, poetry/poetics, and linguistics (generative syntax/phonology). His first book, Troublemakers: Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2012. He is currently working on two projects: a study of various modes of articulation—including the innovative forms of linguistic experimentation that attend these—in the poetic work of Evie Shockley, entitled "Braided Language: Syntax and the Poetry of Evie Shockley," as well as a study of John Cheever's fiction.

“Stylistics, Syntax, and Poetic Breakdowns”
A basic premise for this interdisciplinary literature and linguistics course is that poetry – unique among all the verbal arts – operates at both conscious and unconscious registers of human cognition.  This course poses, and seeks to answer, the following two questions: 1) What structural elements common to many of the world’s languages are also frequently found in works of verbal art – namely, poetry – composed in various languages? 2) How might a careful study of these linguistic structures help to expand, deepen, reconfigure, or otherwise change our longstanding assumptions about poetry specifically, and the use of language in literature (both poetry and prose) more generally?