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6 books match the query 'Professor'

cover of A Professor in the Wilderness: Peter Damian Before the Gregorian Refor

A Professor in the Wilderness

Peter Damian Before the Gregorian Refor

John Howe

Catholic University of America Press, 2027

In the eleventh century a small group of clerical reformers based in Rome launched a fight for the liberty of the Church. The consequences ultimately included a politically powerful papacy and stronger kingdoms with their own more secular laws and bureaucracies. One way to understand what happened is to examine the life of Peter Damian, the most prolific Latin writer of the mid eleventh century and a pioneer in the reform movement. He has never before received a comprehensive critical historical biography. Peter was an orphan boy from Ravenna who became a successful professor of rhetoric. Then he abandoned that career to join a community of penitent hermits living in the high Apennines at Fonte Avellana. He did not actually manage to leave the world behind because he was chosen as prior of his hermit community and had to employ his rhetorical and legal skills to protect it from predatory local lords and “bad bishops and abbots.” He cultivated contacts with the emperor and the pope. In 1057 he was named bishop of Ostia, the leader of the cardinal bishops. As a high official in the Roman Church, aided by his prolific writings, he promoted a reforming agenda. He proved to be a formidable papal legate. At the end of his career, he retired to Fonte Avellana where he remained active until he died on a final legatine mission, probably in 1073. Peter advanced the movement known today as the “Gregorian Reform” not only by strengthening papal power and canon law but also by helping to develop a powerful curial bureaucracy with new means of communication that gave the Roman curia more control over local churches. His successes, failures, and misadventures illuminate a major turning point in Western civilization.
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cover of NOVEL PROFESSIONS: INTERESTED DISINTEREST AND THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

NOVEL PROFESSIONS

INTERESTED DISINTEREST AND THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

Jennifer Ruth

The Ohio State University Press, 2006

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cover of Once a Professor: A Memoir of Teaching in Turbulent Times

Once a Professor

A Memoir of Teaching in Turbulent Times

Jerry Apps

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018

Farm boy professor shares a life of lessons.  

“I never wanted to be a professor,” writes Jerry Apps in the introduction to Once a Professor. Yet a series of unexpected events and unplanned experiences put him on an unlikely path—and led to a thirty-eight-year career at the University of Wisconsin. 

In this continuation of the Apps life story begun in his childhood memoir Limping through Life, Wisconsin’s celebrated rural storyteller shares stories from his years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1957 to 1995, when he left the university to lecture and write fulltime. During those years Apps experienced the turmoil of protests and riots at the UW in the 1960s, the struggles of the tenure process and faculty governance, and the ever-present pressure to secure funding for academic research and programs. 

Through it all, the award-winning writer honed a personal philosophy of education—one that values critical thinking, nontraditional teaching approaches, and hands-on experiences outside of the classroom. Colorful characters, personal photos, and journal entries from the era enrich this account of an unexpected campus career.
 
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cover of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning

Picture a Professor

Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning

Jessamyn Neuhaus

West Virginia University Press, 2022

“Does a service to all who would prefer a different path, offering realistic strategies to engage students in undermining scholarly stereotypes.”—Science

Picture a Professor is a collection of evidence-based insights and intersectional teaching strategies crafted by and for college instructors. It aims to inspire transformative student learning while challenging stereotypes about what a professor looks like.

Representing a variety of scholarly disciplines, the volume’s contributing authors offer practical advice for effectively navigating student preconceptions about embodied identity and academic expertise. Each contributor recognizes the pervasiveness of racialized, gendered, and other biases about professors and recommends specific ways to respond to and interrupt such preconceptions—helping students, teachers, and others reenvision what we think of when we picture a professor.

Educators at every stage of their career will find affirming acknowledgment of the ways systemic inequities affect college teaching conditions, as well as actionable advice about facilitating student learning with innovative course design, classroom activities, assessment techniques, and more.

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cover of The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga

The Beggar and the Professor

A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

University of Chicago Press, 1997

From a wealth of vivid autobiographical writings, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons. With masterful erudition, Le Roy Ladurie deepens and expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions, and character of an age poised at the threshold of modernity.

"Le Roy Ladurie paints a remarkably contemporary picture of life in the sixteenth century. . . . It's a good story, told with a deft narrative touch."—Michael S. Kimmel, The Nation

"Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the representative detail and uses the Platters' lives as a means to see a whole century 'through a glass, darkly'."—The Independent

"Le Roy Ladurie has not only thoroughly sketched out the Platters' particular brand of gusto, he has also made it seem a defining characteristic of the sixteenth century."—The New Republic

"All [of] the drama and pathos of a Disney film."—Emily Eakin, Lingua Franca
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cover of The Professor and the Profession

The Professor and the Profession

Robert Bechtold Heilman

University of Missouri Press, 1999

Robert Bechtold Heilman is one of the last survivors of a remarkable generation of American critics that included such literary giants as Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson, men to whom literary criticism was not a profession or an academic necessity but a calling. In a distinguished career that has spanned nearly six decades, Heilman has influenced generations of scholars and critics through his exquisitely written commentaries on subjects ranging from William Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy.

In The Professor and the Profession, Heilman looks back over his life and times from his perspective as both an academic and an American. Differing in theme and subject matter, the essays included in this collection are ultimately unified by the author himself. Whether the topic is football, Robert Penn Warren, or education, Heilman's generous and intelligent voice emerges on every page. Yet this collection is more than one academic's personal reminiscences; it is a reflection upon American literary history itself.

In the first section of essays, "The Self Displayed," Heilman reveals how he developed from a small-town boy into a distinguished critic and teacher, touching upon his participation in baseball and love of football along the way. "Writers Portrayed" and "Literary Types and Problems Inspected," the following sections, offer his opinions on the past and on the current state of American literary criticism, including personal portraits of such renowned friends as Eric Voegelin, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Malcolm Cowley. The final section, "Education Examined," is an enlightening inquiry into the development of American universities in the twentieth century.

A fascinating chronicle of a significant academic life, The Professor and the Profession will appeal to a broad array of scholars, from young academics wanting to know where they came from to those of Heilman's generation who can appreciate this personal reminiscence into the world of letters.

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