Lifetime Achievements
Paul Brians spent the last thirty-nine years as a professor in the WSU English Department. He will be greatly missed by his students and fellow colleagues.
Can you provide us with 2 or 3 highlights of your teaching career here?
PB: It’s hard to choose 2 or 3 highlights in a career of 39 years, but I’ll throw out some ideas and you can choose your favorites. I assume you don’t mean teaching alone, but professional career.
My favorite class has been Humanities 303: Reason, Romanticism, and Revolution, introducing generations of students to challenging authors such as Voltaire, Goethe, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Marx. It was especially rewarding to discuss this material with older students online via Distance Degree Programs for several years.
I’m proud of my work with the WSU library over the years, helping build collections in science fiction research, Anglophone literature, feature film on DVD, and classical music composed by women and African-Americans. I received the Faculty Library Award, but the best thing to come out of my connection with the libraries is my marriage with Paula Elliot, music librarian extraordinaire.
I had a lot of fun creating presentations for my science fiction film class (2005), including especially a multimedia extravaganza demonstrating the ways in which George Lucas transformed themes from the old Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials in his initial Star Wars films.
In 1987 I was invited to speak in Moscow at the Seventh World Congress of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War on the research that led to my book Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895-1984 (Kent State University Press), which led to a long series of collaborations with Russians on various projects.
In 1992 I was given the Burlington Northern Award for excellence in teaching for my work in helping to create the World Civilizations courses at WSU. I acted as editor-in-chief for three editions of the world civics reader, Reading About the World, which involved the creation of translations for classic texts which are widely reprinted and the Web-based copies of which are used by students and teachers all over the world.
In 1997 the American Information Service sent me to Germany to speak about American science fiction in Bonn and other cities.
My “Common Errors in English” Web site has attracted over nine million visitors over the past ten years and led to the publication of a book (Common Errors in English Usage published by William, James Co., with 40,000 copies sold so far), four popular annual boxed calendars, and a license to NBC News to use my material on their forthcoming high school educational site, iCue.
The book I am proudest of having written is Modern South Asian Literature in English (Greenwood Press, 2003) in which I tried to make accessible to a wide audience works by authors from Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka.
Over my career I’ve published an op-ed piece in the New York Times (on nuclear imagery in pop culture), been interviewed on Radio Free Europe (about the film remake of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris), on Voice of America (about language usage), and in the Wall Street Journal (about fruitcake), and had my photographs used on the History and National Geographic channels. Most of these and many other opportunities resulted from the visibility and popularity of materials I’ve put on the Web over the past decade.
You have been quite involved in the community art scene here at WSU. Can you talk about how that interest developed and some of the highlights of your involvement over the years?
PB: I imagine you mean arts. I’ve never been terribly involved in the visual arts until I began to do photography in a serious way. An exhibit of my photographs is planned for later this spring in Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections at WSU. I maintained a community cultural events calendar on the Web for many years, integrating information about Moscow, UI, Pullman, and WSU concerts, exhibits, and plays.
What has changed, and what has stayed the same, during the thirty years you've been here?
PB: I arrived in 1968 at the age of 26, and was immediately plunged into the counterculture and antiwar movement of the time. After the mid-seventies, I watched student engagement in politics decline drastically, but have been heartened to see it revive somewhat in recent years. In the sixties interest in literary studies reached a peak among undergraduates. In the seventies this sharply declined, and has never really recovered. It has been sad to see literary studies so marginalized within the university, to the extent that most students graduate without ever having read a single significant work of literature during their college careers.
But it has been rewarding in recent years to see a revival of interest in my own field: international studies (my Ph.D. is in Comparative Literature (Indiana University, 1968). I was originally hired at WSU to teach in an international literature program, and it is exciting to see the departments of Foreign Languages and English shaping a new graduate degree in global literature and film.
I was one of the founders of Pullman’s Community Free University, and coordinated for forty years, until the idea of volunteer-based alternative education lost popularity. In a way, the pleasure I took in the free sharing of ideas, skills, and information has been continued by activities on the Web. What is lost in personal contact is somewhat compensated for by the ability to participate a far larger world-wide community.
The eighties were a dismal period in which vocational goals dominated students and interest in the liberal arts plummeted; but there has been a substantial recovery since, and there are many interesting and interested students in our classes these days. The prominence of the Web in their lives has led many of them to become enthusiastic readers, writers, and researchers.
What do you plan to do with your time when you retire? Will you continue to be involved in mainstream publishing with your grammar books and interviews?
PB: I don’t do grammar, really; it’s usage.
I plan to continue my Web work, publishing photographs, maintaining my Common Errors site, and adding new projects as I think of them. My wife and I have plans for much more travel, and I want to continue with photography. But mainly I want to enjoy living at our home on Bainbridge Island in easy reach of the rich cultural and culinary resources of Seattle. I hope to continue giving public lectures at libraries, for civic groups, etc. on topics that interest me.
Can you talk a little bit about where you are going after this, and what things about the area (the Palouse) you might miss?
PB: I will miss the Palouse hills in spring and the many friends we’ve made here, but most of all I will miss watching the spark in students’ eyes when something I’ve introduced them to catches their imagination: French Enlightenment thought, Bach’s Mass in B minor, the art of Mary Cassatt, or the singing of Billie Holiday.
You have played a major part in developing the undergraduate major and in advising students. As the outgoing Undergraduate Studies Director, what direction do you think the undergraduate program should go?
PB: I’ve greatly enjoyed my job as Director of Undergraduate Studies in English for the past four years, helping shape new courses, promoting our outstanding programs to students and parents, and helping solve the problems of advisees and guide them toward interesting courses.
The program has changed a lot in recent years, and I’m pretty happy with the way it’s headed. Enrollments are growing, and we have a wonderful batch of young new professors to carry on. I hope that others will continue and expand the international multimedia, comparative arts approach to intellectual history that has been my prime concern.
Paul Brians's Retirement Party was held in the Library Atrium on April 18, 2008. Paul delivered a moving speech about his work over the last forty years. Read Paul's Speech.
