The Floating University sheds light on a story of optimism and imperialist ambition in the 1920s.

In 1926, New York University professor James E. Lough—an educational reformer with big dreams—embarked on a bold experiment he called the Floating University. Lough believed that taking five hundred American college students around the globe by ship would not only make them better citizens of the world but would demonstrate a model for responsible and productive education amid the unprecedented dangers, new technologies, and social upheavals of the post–World War I world. But the Floating University’s maiden voyage was also its last: when the ship and its passengers returned home, the project was branded a failure—the antics of students in hotel bars and port city back alleys that received worldwide press coverage were judged incompatible with educational attainment, and Lough was fired and even put under investigation by the State Department.
 
In her new book, Tamson Pietsch excavates a rich and meaningful picture of Lough’s grand ambition, its origins, and how it reveals an early-twentieth-century America increasingly defined both by its imperialism and the professionalization of its higher education system. As Pietsch argues, this voyage—powered by an internationalist worldview—traced the expanding tentacles of US power, even as it tried to model a new kind of experiential education. She shows that this apparent educational failure actually exposes a much larger contest over what kind of knowledge should underpin university authority, one in which direct personal experience came into conflict with academic expertise. After a journey that included stops at nearly fifty international ports and visits with figures ranging from Mussolini to Gandhi, what the students aboard the Floating University brought home was not so much knowledge of the greater world as a demonstration of their nation’s rapidly growing imperial power.

In this book, Jay Jordan draws from WAC/WID, second language writing, rhetoric and composition, and scholarship on English teaching and learning in South Korea to describe the ways writing as a privileged literate activity shapes and is shaped by the development of one university’s transnational campuses. Through grounded analysis of three years of student and faculty surveys and interviews, writing samples, observations, and through personal narrative about the author’s experience at both campuses, Grounded Literacies in a Transnational WAC/WID Ecology closely describes and theorizes the intellectual, social, and material complexities of cross-border educational efforts. Despite the smoothly marketable promise of many U.S.-based international educational experiments, the mutual embeddedness of campus, university, host city, student and faculty experiences, differing expectations, national aspirations, and individual and collective goals and anxieties richly nuances the argument that literacies can never be reduced to classroom or curricular plans.
 

When Temple University Japan (TUJ) was founded in 1982—to advance the mission of international higher education—the university had few ties to Japan, or any other Asian country. However, more than 40 years later, TUJ has overcome substantial obstacles and remains the only American university campus in Japan, gaining legitimacy and considerable respect as an international institution of higher education. In The History of Temple University Japan, two former TUJ Deans, Richard Joslyn and Bruce Stronach, explore the creation, development, and maturation of TUJ, and present a case study of how Temple University successfully created an overseas branch campus.
 
The authors recount the development of the academic program, the recruitment of students, and the support from Temple that enabled curricular and pedagogical improvement. 
They also address the university’s relationships with three Japanese partners, and the financial threats and crises TUJ faced over the decades. 
 
The History of Temple University Japan is not only an important documentation of TUJ, but also a history of U.S.-Japanese relations. What emerges is the significant impact TUJ has had on the thousands of students, faculty, and staff who have been a part of this international academic institution.  
 
 

Translingual and Transnational Graduate Education in Rhetoric and Composition investigates the implications of composition studies’ changing terminological and ideological landscape around language and nation for the professionalization of future university writing teacher-scholars. As the collection editors argue, incorporating translingual and transnational theories into graduate pedagogy and curricular structures is necessary if they are to shape professional practices in rhetoric and composition  long term.
 
Contributors to the collection articulate the need for translingual and transnational sensibilities in rhetoric and composition graduate programs in light of the material conditions of graduate students’ lives and labor. They further present pathways for rethinking the design of graduate-level coursework, foreign language learning policies and labor, mentoring practices, writing teacher and writing center tutor training, and other professionalization initiatives. Offering a range of conceptually and empirically driven pieces, the collection brings together the voices and lived experiences of graduate students, faculty advisors, and administrators involved in the constant, necessary reworking of rhetoric and composition graduate education in a variety of institutional locales.
 
Translingual and Transnational Graduate Education in Rhetoric and Composition provides inspiration for graduate programs working to enact well-grounded curricular and pedagogical changes to counter the long-standing effects of the dominant racist and monolingualist ideologies in higher education generally, and rhetoric and composition studies specifically.
 
Contributors: Lucía Durá, Patricia Flores, Joe Franklin, Moisés Garcia-Renteria, Bruce Horner, Aimee Jones, Corina Lerma, Kate Mangelsdorf, Brice Nordquist, Madelyn Pawlowski, Christine Tardy, Amy Wan, Alex Way, Anselma Widha Prihandita, Joe Wilson, Xiaoye You, Emily Yuko Cousins, Michelle Zaleski