Editorial Institute featured in “Applied Humanities” article from CAS Communications
The excerpt below was featured in the article, titled “Humanities Master’s Programs: Exploring What Makes Us Human,” from the Office of CAS Communications and was written by Michael Samuels.
Editorial Studies: Sharing What It Means to Be Human – With Annotations and Corrections
The Editorial Institute at BU straddles the divide between academia and the “real world.” As one of the “applied humanities,” editorial studies prepare graduate students to become creators, protectors, and advocates of art and culture, with far-reaching impact.
What do you do with a degree in editorial studies? Christopher Ricks, literary critic and scholar, authority on Victorian poetry and Bob Dylan lyrics, and, with Archie Burnett, co-director of BU’s Editorial Institute, starts off by telling his students a story. He found, in “a catalogue from an absolutely first-rate autograph house in New York, for a very stiff price, a letter which the catalogue claimed was the last letter that Alfred Tennyson wrote during his life.” Ricks, who has edited Tennyson’s poems, recognized the handwriting: it wasn’t the poet’s, but his son’s. Ricks traced the misattribution back to its source, and called the autograph house. “There was a long pause at the other end of the phone,” he recalls, “and they said, ‘Would you send us the evidence of this?’ I said, ‘Yes.’”
Every text, he explains, involves editorial decisions about which version is best, what additional information deserves a footnote or endnote, what is a mistake and what is a creative liberty (Ricks says, for example, that he prefers Emily Dickinson’s spelling in the line “It stop opon a Spot”). The ability to make those decisions is almost universally useful, he says: “We all, all the time, in pretty well every discipline, use editions.”
“Our degrees, whether the one-year MA or the PhD, are not professional degrees, they’re academic degrees. Nevertheless, several of our successful students move into the publishing world.” Others become editors – including the editor of the prominent magazine Poetry – and still others go into curatorship, the rare book trade, library science, journalism, cultural organization administration…
Perhaps the best indication of the value of Editorial Studies is where students come from. The poet Saskia Hamilton edited two books of the letters of Robert Lowell, with informal guidance from Ricks. “Having done that work on those two books I just realized that there was a lot more about editing that I wanted to study,” she says, and the Editorial Institute was “the best place in the world” to do so. As she completes her degree at BU, Hamilton is applying what she’s learned to the classes she herself teaches as an English professor at Barnard.
For others, Editorial Studies is appealing because of its applicability outside the university. “I wasn’t interested in literary theory,” recalls Casy Calver (GRS ’14).“What really attracted me to editorial studies was this idea that you’re presenting material for the reader that they wouldn’t otherwise have, and you’re not interpreting it.”
Last spring, Calver defended her dissertation, an edition of the questionnaire Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (she likens it to Live Aid, but with T.S. Eliot instead of Bono). Now, Calver is the managing editor of two Boston Medical Center journals, Alcohol, Other Drugs, and Health: Current Evidence, and Addiction Science & Clinical Practice. “It’s really more the passion and the discipline of editing that gets translated to what I do now,” she says. “The basics of editing are universal.”
In light of that, “BU is very lucky to have Editorial Studies, because so many literature programs are theory-based, interpretation-based,” Calver adds. “Many people who have a literature background are going to go into work as editors and literary editors and they’re not going to have that kind of training that we are lucky enough to have.”
Editorial studies are applicable and lead to jobs, but no less importantly, the subject is a vital part of the study of literature, something that makes us better humans, expanding our view of the world. “We need to be able to entertain beliefs which we don’t hold,” says Professor Ricks. “The only two ways in which we do it are with individuals we love and with works of art.” As long as art and the study of art remain vital, then, so too will editorial studies. And BU’s Editorial Institute will remain one of the best places to launch—or further—a career in the applied humanities.