In this interview, Professor Matt Gold and PublicsLab Fellow Rob Yates discuss how the curriculum grant awarded to the English program supported transformations to their coursework, examinations, mentorship, and professionalization efforts. Along the way, they consider how these multifaceted efforts to expand the doctoral curriculum intersect with the ongoing fight against legacies of white supremacy that remain embedded within our programs and institutions.
This interview was recorded by Nic Benacerraf on May 23, 2023.
“…we were thinking about how this grant could help us alter our curriculum, have conversations within the program about what we wanted and what kind of changes might be possible, and to think about how we could re-orient the program as a whole towards thinking about multiple publics as we did our work.”– Matt Gold“I see this grant-work as doing a lot of the intellectual and philosophical work of why this matters. If we do think of ourselves as a Public University that is committed to deep and creative avenues of study, then what does it mean to think about expressions of scholarship and learning that is untraditional in form? Why is it recognizable to some audiences and not others?”– Rob Yates
Matt Gold is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives, and where he directs the MA Program in Digital Humanities and the MS Program in Data Analysis and Visualization. With Lauren F. Klein, he co-edits the Debates in the Digital Humanities series at the University of Minnesota Press, and has recently co-edited Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities and Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. His collaborative digital humanities projects, including Manifold Scholarship, the CUNY Academic Commons, and The Commons In A Box have been supported by grants from a the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and other funding institutions. He is Past President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the US-based scholarly society for the digital humanities, and the Association for Digital Humanities Organizations, the international association for DH organizations.
Rob Yates is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. Robert’s research focuses on early modern literature and culture. He is writing a dissertation on care in early modern Anglophone world. Before arriving at The Graduate Center, Robert worked as a Graduate Associate at Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), as well as a curriculum designer of English courses at D.C. Public Schools.
For the 2022-2023 academic year, Robert is the Lillian Goldman Law Library Rare Book Fellow at Yale Law School. He will research British and American legal materials from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as part of his ongoing research on care, while also curating exhibits and educational experiences based on the library’s holdings, which are relevant to the multiple publics that visit or dwell in New Haven each day.
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