Rate My Professor Gerald Graff

Gerald Graff, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois Chicago, is recognized as one of his generation's most influential commentators on education, particularly through his historical and theoretical work on literary studies and his practical impact on teaching writing and argument. Born and raised in Chicago, he earned a B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1959 and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1963. His distinguished career spans several leading institutions: assistant professor at the University of New Mexico (1963-1966); at Northwestern University (1966-1991), where he advanced to professor in 1970, held the John C. Shaffer Professorship of English and Humanities (1979-1991), chaired the English Department (1977-1983), and directed the University Press (1985-1987); George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English and Education at the University of Chicago (1991-2000); and at UIC from 2000, serving as Professor of English and Education with a joint appointment in the College of Education and Associate Dean for Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2000-2003).

Graff's scholarship focuses on curricular and disciplinary conflicts in Literature and education, advocating "teaching the conflicts" to make academic discourse more accessible. Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, he authored Professing Literature: An Institutional History (University of Chicago Press, 1987; twentieth anniversary edition 2007), a standard reference on the development of academic literary study in America. Other key works include Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979), Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992)—which received the 1992 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the 1992-93 Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities—Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), and They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, co-authored with Cathy Birkenstein (first edition 2006; fourth edition 2018), widely adopted in colleges and high schools. He edited Jacques Derrida’s Limited Inc. (1989) and co-edited critical editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Tempest. Graff was President of the Modern Language Association in 2008, received the MLA's Francis March Award for Distinguished Service in 2011, and was a 1994-95 fellow at Stanford's Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He founded Teachers for a Democratic Culture in 1991 and has delivered lectures at over two hundred universities.