>Do you find yourself being just as concerned when the reading list is 7 male authors and 2 female authors? Or only in this direction?
Not at all, it just stuck out at me while I was browsing through their program. Women represent barely a blip in the world of the 19th C. novel, you might as well teach military history as a series of female leaders. Novels of that era represent a core teaching (or should) in English departments, not an opportunity to boost underserved demographics. Save that for a specialty class.
I don't give a damn about fairness so much as teaching the truth, and the truth includes relative values of things.
It is a graduate class, well past any level where you'd expect reading lists to be a representative slice of anything. I'd generally expect a graduate class on "the 19th century novel" to be roughly built around whatever books the PhD student or professor teaching the class personally loves and knows very deeply.
And military history should involve the voices of women. There is more to the subject than just who marched where and who gave orders when.
Not at all, it just stuck out at me while I was browsing through their program. Women represent barely a blip in the world of the 19th C. novel, you might as well teach military history as a series of female leaders. Novels of that era represent a core teaching (or should) in English departments, not an opportunity to boost underserved demographics. Save that for a specialty class.
I don't give a damn about fairness so much as teaching the truth, and the truth includes relative values of things.