Professor of English and Education and Associate Dean of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Previously served as the Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.Gerald Graff is one of his generation’s most influential commentators on education, not only as a historian and theorist, but also through his wide impact on the classroom practice of teachers. His 1987 book, Professing Literature: An Institutional History, which is widely regarded as a definitive work, has recently been reprinted in a Twentieth Anniversary Edition by the University of Chicago Press. This book also helped launch Graff’s argument, subsequently developed in Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992), that schools and colleges should respond to curricular and disciplinary conflicts by “teaching the conflicts,” incorporating debates, for example, about how literature, history, and the sciences should be studied in courses themselves. Graff’s idea of teaching the conflicts has also inspired two widely used “Critical Controversy” textbooks, editions of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, both edited by Graff and James Phelan, as well as the popular collection, Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, edited by David Richter with a preface by Graff.
With the publication of Clueless in Academe in 2003, Graff’s work has focused particularly on (in the book’s subtitle) How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, and on how schools and colleges can demystify academic intellectual culture for all students, not just the high-achieving few. This book helped inspire a basic writing textbook, “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (2006), co-written by Graff and his wife Cathy Birkenstein, which continues to set records for sales in colleges and high schools. Graff (and now Graff and Birkenstein) has given invited lectures and workshops at hundreds of schools and colleges.
Most recently, Graff’s work has directly influenced the Common Core State Standards for K-12 schools, in which Graff is quoted in support of “The Special Place of Argument in the Standards:the Standards put particular emphasis on students’ ability to write sound arguments on substantive topics and issues, as this ability is critical to college and career readiness.
