Rutgers English Department News
Lauren M.E. Goodlad, chair of Critical AI, is featured in an article on the Ethics of Algorithms in Rutgers Magazine.
The Ethics of Algorithms
By Paula Derrow
Artificial intelligence (AI) has made aspects of life more convenient and even safer, courtesy of services such as Siri and Alexa. “There are tremendous benefits to AI,” says Fred S. Roberts, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) and director of the Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA). The center is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in which Rutgers is the lead partner of this university consortium. “We can use facial recognition technology to identify missing children, for instance, or diagnose rare diseases. But you have to keep the trade-offs in mind.”
One of those trade-offs is that the powerful, predictive algorithms fueling everything from facial recognition technology to who gets a bank loan or a traffic ticket can adversely affect your privacy, health, well-being, and personal finances—and are leading to inequities in American society.
“With AI, people tend to worry about things like super-intelligent computers turned evil like in The Terminator,” says Lauren M.E. Goodlad, a professor in the Department of English at SAS and chair of Critical AI, a new interdisciplinary initiative examining the ethics of artificial intelligence. What is worrisome, she says, “is how this technology can be used in an opaque way to manipulate our behavior, as we’ve seen with Facebook, along with other problems that are making our country more unequal than it has been since the Gilded Age.”
Congratulations to Marie Freibergs, Grace Kincaid, Christopher Wolfe, and Alessandra Sperling who were honored with 2021 SAS Staff Excellence Awards. Each year Peter March, Executive Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, recognizes staff who have distinguished themselves in service excellence, dedication to the School of Arts and Sciences, and our students and constituents.
2021 Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Student Experience:
The Rutgers Writing Center Team: Marie Freibergs, Grace Kincaid, Christopher Wolfe. In a typical semester, the Writing Center schedules 1000 undergraduates who will be working with 130 peer writing tutors. Marie, Grace, and Christopher were singled out for their flexibility in helping the Center pivot under pandemic conditions while maintaining the highest levels of efficiency, professionalism, and care. This is underscored by the comments of the tutors and tutees, who marvel at the speed with which their inquiries are answered and the respect they receive from these caring and dedicated staff members.
2021 Award for Outstanding Contributions to Operational Excellence:
Alessandra Sperling, Administrator, English Writing Program. According to her nominators, Alessandra was “exemplary and heroic” amid the disruption caused by the pandemic allowed the scheduling process for EWP to actually improve in terms of efficiency, communication, and adherence to deadlines in comparison with pre-COVID times. She is praised for her positive attitude, work ethic, responsiveness, and accountability in helping the Program manage the complexities of the changing directives on course offerings and modalities that COVID has induced.
The University has moved to remote instruction until Monday, Jan. 31, 2022. Students are advised to check Canvas sites for information about how their individual courses will be managed for the first two weeks of the spring semester. Students are also required to obtain boosters shots as soon as possible. Full details about these changes, requirements, and guidelines can be found here: https://coronavirus.rutgers.edu/significant-changes-related-to-covid-19/
Congratulations to Sal Ayala Camarillo, Erin Kelly, Daniel Walsh, and Alicia Williams who were honored with 2021 Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education. Each year, awards for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education are given to professors and teaching assistants in the School of Arts and Sciences to recognize their outstanding achievements in and beyond the classroom, their engagement with their students and pedagogic communities, and their overall commitment to the undergraduate education mission. And, each year, the theme that inevitably shines through in each nomination is the students’ understanding that these instructors “genuinely want us to learn.”
This year a new, special category has been added: Pandemic Pedagogy. Since March 10, 2020—when the pandemic necessitated online instruction—there have been so many extraordinary contributions to under education. This special category, open to any full-time SAS faculty or staff, or group of faculty and staff, recognizes outstanding work in supporting others during the pandemic in developing instruction that meets the highest standards for online pedagogy.
Congratulations to Nela Navarro who is honored with a 2021 Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. Nela is the Associate Director Rutgers English Language Institute (RELI) and Associate Director for the Rutgers Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights (GGHR). Each year, the award is awarded to non-tenure-track, full-time faculty members in the arts and humanities, sciences, and social sciences who have demonstrated outstanding teaching skills in classroom instruction, clinical instruction, curriculum development, or mentoring.
Summer 2021
Welcome to the Department of English at Rutgers!
We are a vibrant group of scholars, teachers, students, and staff who are dedicated to the study of literature in English and to the arts of careful reading and effective writing. The largest unit in the School of Arts and Sciences, the English department encompasses multilingual language learners and those pursuing doctoral research, undergraduates taking their first courses in literary study and renowned poets and scholars at the forefront of their fields. Our department includes creative writers, book historians, literary theorists, film and media specialists, and experts in writing in English from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present, in the British Isles, the Americas, and across the globe.
The 2021 URWC launches Thursday, May 13th as a permanent site through Rutgers Libraries and showcases the outstanding work completed by research writing students in the Rutgers Writing Program. Organized into 9 panels ranging in topics from psychology and mental health, to feminism, environmental justice, politics, the arts, education, and more, the 90 presentations represent the many disciplines and programs at the University, as well as the contemporary issues that our students are passionate about.
Congratulations to Douglas Jones and Eagan Dean who were honored with 2020 Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education. Each year, these awards are given to professors and teaching assistants in the School of Arts and Sciences to recognize their outstanding achievements in and beyond the classroom, their engagement with their students and pedagogic communities, and their overall commitment to the undergraduate education mission
The personal library of the late Cheryl Wall, a scholar recognized for advancing the conversation about African American literature, will be available for a new generation of research and examination at Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s Paul Robeson Cultural Center following a donation from her family. This gift is meant to encourage student analysis and appreciation of Black writers.
The English Department congratulates Leandra Cain, Courtney Borack, and Cheryl Robinson, recipients of Staff COVID-19 Response Awards and Aimee LaBrie, recipient of a 2020 Staff Excellence Award.
INDIVIDUAL RECIPIENT OF THE STAFF COVID-19 RESPONSE AWARDS
Leandra Cain, Department of English
With the hiring freeze leaving the department unable to replace a staff member who left just as the pandemic hit, Leandra took up the slack in order to keep the administrative operations humming. The transition to remote learning in English, as for everyone, involved a great deal of administrative juggling – but the sheer number of courses that had to be reimagined for remote instruction was daunting. Leandra managed to coordinate the transition for well over eighty classes with fifty different instructors. Quietly, meticulously, compassionately – all while doing the work of two people -- she has simply made undergraduate instruction during COVID possible in the department.
Remote Learning
As you know, just about all undergraduate courses will be offered remotely, on-line in the spring 2021 term.
The Schedule of Classes has been fully updated to indicate exactly how each class will be organized. Look up each of your courses in the Schedule of Classes to review the Course Format, the Section Comments, and the Course Notes.
The Modern Language Association of America has awarded its fifty-first annual James Russell Lowell Prize to Lynn Festa for her book Fiction without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding book—a literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography—written by a member of the association.
The late Cheryl Wall, Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English, was selected as this year’s winner of the American Literature Society’s highest honor, the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies. The medal is sponsored by the American Literature Society, an allied organization of the Modern Language Association, and is awarded annually to one “scholar whose lifetime of scholarly work has significantly advanced the study of American literature.”
Congratulations to Dr. Nicole Houser, Rutgers English Language Institute Director and Faculty, who was awarded a Rutgers Global 2020 International Collaborative Research Grant. Grant funds will support Dr. Houser's research titled, Neurodiversity and English Language Learners: Creating a Pedagogy of Inclusion for the Global Classroom, an international project between Rutgers English Language Institute (RELI) and the Language School at San Miguel de Allende, ENES León, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
We, the members of the English department, collectively express our support for the 31 August 2020 letter to the university’s President and Chancellor authored by Black/Indigenous/Person of Color faculty specializing in race at Rutgers University, in this department and beyond it. We understand and value the necessity of designing institutional structures, programs, and inquiries for the study of race as a means of addressing the systemic inequities that persist within our institution.