This fall, the Faculty Development Committee and the Office of Academic Affairs at Hartwick College will present three speakers in the annual Faculty Lecture Series.
All talks (unless noted) take place at during the common hour: 12:20–1:20 p.m. in Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall at Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York.
The lectures are free and open to the public.
Joseph Von Stengel, “AI-Empowered Creativity,” Friday, September 11, 2026.
And lo, today is one of those great good days in which I have two publications. “2025.02,”“2025.04,”“2025.05–06” (p. 2), “2025.07,” and “2025.11,” some of my most recent sonnets that most directly comment on this moment we find ourselves living through, just came out in Other Rooms Press. Here‘s a page that gathers the poems together (and then right click the images and open them into new tab so you can zoom in) or else click on the individual poem links above.
This interview with literary critic Anna Kornbluh was conducted on October 18, 2024, in conjunction with her delivery of the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College. With her most recent book, Immediacy; or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), Kornbluh has established herself as one of the most insightful and important critics of contemporary culture. In this conversation, she reflects on how she came to literary studies, the strangeness of realism, dialectical reading, and the role of style in literary criticism. Kornbluh also discusses political formalism and the value of institutions, the term neoliberalism, social media, the relationship between organizing and literary study, recent projects on climate counteraesthetics and middlebrow aesthetics, and the political realities of late 2024.
In further interview news, I have conducted and am currently transcribing and editing an interview with Paul A. Bové.
“2023.20” (also here), one of the last unpublished sonnets from the second volume of my ongoing sonnet sequence, is in the inaugural issue of The Colby Review. Thanks so much to Zach Peckham and the student editors of the journal for including my work.
Most notably, after twenty years of teaching predominantly writing-intensive courses in which I assigned essays, poems, and stories to be composed outside of class, in response to the frustration the sheer amount of student work I have seen generated by artificial intelligence (AI) has caused me and the more general neofeudal edtechification of higher education, I made the decision this spring to make my courses (almost) completely analog in terms of assignments, materials, and expectations. Students write all their papers in class. Students are required to have print books, and I print out all PDFs for them to read and annotate. No one has a smart phone or a laptop anywhere in sight. It’s glorious, old school, amazingly analog. And it is working.[1]
I am calling this teaching without computers, and it has been revolutionary for my pedagogy and peace of mind, revitalizing the classroom as a space of human connection, energy, communication, thinking, and poiesis while also assuaging my own considerable frustrations with and despair about my job over the past few years, a job that at some point seemed destined to be little more than that of plagiarism detective. All my previous engagement with students’ ideas and their attempts to express those ideas were slowly and almost completely strained away over the past three-odd years with nothing left but policing, constantly on the lookout for evidence of now seemingly ubiquitous large-language model (LLM) use infecting and subverting the reading, writing, and thinking of our students, of an entire generation of young people, of, really, everyone, compromising our very humanity with its tepid, dumb slop. Though I am only six weeks into the semester, the transformation teaching without computers has wrought upon my classroom has been remarkable. My students have, to a large degree, embraced my new pedagogy, as I suspect it has given them back something that I perhaps only now realize had been lost in classrooms years before LLMs had emerged. I cannot recommend this (and other) kind(s) of AI-resistant pedagogy enough for other people teaching in the critical humanities. I am a convert. Fully. And I expect that, whatever comes next for me as a teacher, a big part of it will be proselytizing for the new good news: teaching and learning without computers.
For more resources on resisting AI in our teaching, see Anna Kornbluh, Eric Hayot, Krista Muratore, and Gina Stinnett’s Against AI.
[1] That said, there are still some digital elements in my classes. For example, obviously I still require that students play video games in ENGL 352 Critical Game Studies, and I do make available the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary and a thesaurus during in-class writing assignments. Of course, I also happily approve whatever digital accommodations students might need—they just need to ask (and regardless of whether or not they have any documented need for such accommodation).
I am honored that the editors of Always Crashing have nominated my long poem, “Postrock,” for a Pushcart Prize. Thanks so much to them and their ongoing support of my work.
It was a busy weekend—in the course of only a few days, Tally flew to Oneonta from Texas, delivered a lecture, sat down for an interview, and then moderated the final Zoom panel celebrating Fredric Jameson’s ninetieth birthday from my home office (all while he was in the middle of editing Verso’s “Jameson at 90” [2025] blog series)—and so I am deeply thankful to Tally for taking the time to come to Hartwick and chat.
Here’s an abstract of the interview:
This interview with literary critic Robert T. Tally Jr. was conducted on April 26, 2024, in conjunction with his delivery of the 2023–24 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College. Tally is one of the premier critics presently working in the field of spatial literary studies and has published over a dozen books and over one hundred articles and book chapters on US and world literature, critical theory, and the history of criticism. Reflecting broadly on the trajectory of his career, Tally discusses the gratitude that has accompanied his scholarly writing, his interests in spatial literary studies, his relationship with the teaching and work of Jonathan Arac, Paul A. Bové, and Fredric Jameson, and the role of theory at the present time.
The second interview conducted in conjunction with the 2025 Babcock Lecture, my interview with Anna Kornbluh, will appear in the May 2026 issue of boundary 2.
I will have a table with my books for sale—2013–2017: Sonnets (LJMcD Communications, 2024) and perhaps one copy of The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015)—at Author Expo 2025 in Oneonta, New York on Sunday, October 12 from 2:00–4:00 p.m. at the Foothills Performing Arts Center (24 Market St, Oneonta, NY 13820).
The Hyperarchival Parallax 
