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British Association for American Studies

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Michelle Coghlan

J. Michelle Coghlan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Manchester, where she teaches modules on American literature to 1900, radical memory, and US food matters. Her first book, Sensational Internationalism, won the 2017 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize, and she recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food.

Innovative Teaching: Some Reflections on its Pitfalls & Promises

The term “innovation” is often bandied about in UK HE, frequently from on high. It carries with it a whiff of business speak and bureaucracy—certainly, if so-called tech bros ran the university, they’d be calling on us to “always innovate!” in the way Frederic Jameson once exhorted us to “always historicize!” In the business world, the term carries with it a sense of catering to an unarticulated need—Apple realizing we needed smart phones before we did, say—or, more generally, (and here I’m quoting from the online Business Dictionary instead of the OED) “the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value for which customers will pay.” In the context of teaching American Studies in the UK, I think it’s worth remarking that “innovation” isn’t the key word most often used in US HE to describe what I think we mean when we use […]