Building communities of shared interest The first of the interest groups was born because a visiting scholar at the Michigan Society of Fellows (Carla Mazzio, now an assistant professor at the University of Chicago) couldn't believe that a department could be so rich in early modernists and not have some regular way of sharing ideas. So it was thanks to someone coming in from the outside that our first group, the Early Modern Colloquium, was formed. But we could at least recognize a good thing once we saw it. In 1999-2000, modest departmental funds were opened up to support this and other groups, if other groups wanted to be born. Students and faculty were invited to "vote with their feet" by mobilizing into reading or interest groups, which could then propose visiting speakers or student-run conferences or whatever else a critical mass of colleagues wanted to support. Groups formed around historical periods, genres, and national literatures. One formed around form. Over the years, these groups have varied in size and activity. Some would meet in homes and apartments to discuss work-in-progress; others would invite speakers from other units on campus or other universities, or organize conferences of varying sizes and ambitions. Although funded by the department, the groups had to be self-defined and self-governed, and would by definition cease to exist once they were no longer of interest to our actually existing students. Funding for Interest Groups More details on the history and policies regarding funding of interest groups.

Interest groups in action Currently we have a number of interest groups: the Medieval Reading Group, the Early Modern Colloquium, the Eighteenth-Century Studies Group, the Nineteenth Century Forum, the U.S. Literatures and Cultures Group, the Modernisms Reading Group, and the Language and Rhetorical Studies Group. In addition, we have used the same structure to create and fund a Graduate Seminar structured around mini-residences of several prominent scholars. Each interest group has an annual budget to fund speakers, conferences, materials, and refreshments for meetings. Membership in interest groups is open to all graduate students and faculty in the department, and graduate students play a significant role in planning and participating in the groups' activities. Interest group events are open to all and are announced to the department and to related programs, and in some cases to communities outside the University of Michigan. Funding remains available for the founding of additional groups. Modernisms Reading Group Fall 2004 schedule for the Modernisms Reading Group Eighteenth Century Studies Group The home page of the Eighteenth Century Studies Group Early Modern Colloquium The home page of the Early Modern Colloquium.

A reinvigorated intellectual community Interest groups create a virtual space, one that is institutionalized yet relatively informal when compared to a graduate course, in which ideas can be shared and exchanged by students and faculty who might otherwise never have the opportunity for sustained conversation. Graduate students can regularly interact with faculty in a scholarly yet non-evaluative setting, and can share or assume responsibility for the groups' intellectual agenda. Interest groups also offer a forum for faculty with joint appointments to renew connections within the English department and share insights--and even colleagues--from other disciplines.

How do we know that interest groups work? In the five years since interest groups became integral to our department, only one group has dissolved and several new ones have formed. Many of them are interdisciplinary: the U.S. Literatures group attracts participants from the program in American Cultures; faculty from History participate in the Nineteenth Century Forum; colleagues from Romance languages join in the activities of the Medieval interest group; and students and faculty from Romance languages, art history, sociology, and history have participated in the Early Modern Colloquium. Although each interest group operates differently, graduate students and faculty plan activities together in many cases. The groups have grown into intellectual communities that supplement traditional and more formal modes of graduate education like the lecture or the seminar. Some interest groups have hosted national or even international conferences. The Early Modern Colloquium organizes a conference each year, and typically includes UM graduate students and established outside scholars as speakers. Such conferences have included "New Formalisms and the Lyric in History," "Re-inventing Early Modern Technologies," "Premodern Bodies and the Wunderkammer of Queer Objects," and "Medieval and Early Modern Spatial Epistemologies."

Another sign that interest groups are working is the migration of this model to other areas in the department. For example, we have recently created a group called the Junior Faculty Forum. Funded much like one of the graduate student interest groups, this group gives junior faculty a way of meeting together regularly, sharing work and questions and concerns, sometimes identifying ways in which department mentoring of junior faculty could be enhanced. It is a peer-coordinated enterprise, so activities and agendas change one year to the next, but it has added a vital dimension to the department for junior faculty--so much so that it has aided in our recruitment of new faculty.

Reflection from Anne Curzan, Associate Professor The Language and Rhetorical Studies interest group facilitates the kind of rich intellectual conversation, with people who think deeply and care passionately about shared intellectual questions, that is at the heart of academia. I have greatly enjoyed the chance to engage in discussion with graduate students and faculty from English and other departments (Education, Linguistics) about a wide range of issues, from language ideology to the history of rhetoric to cognitive linguistics, in settings outside the classroom, be that in one of the department's meeting rooms or over food in one of our homes. We also share our own work in progress, from conference papers to academic articles, which opens exciting opportunities for graduate students and faculty alike to talk through developing arguments and collaboratively help to shape, through questions, suggestions, and productive discussion, the individual work happening within the community of scholars here at Michigan engaged in research on language and rhetoric.

Reflection from Russ McDonald, 4th year student Participating in the Modernisms Reading Group has definitely been a positive aspect of my experience in the Language and Literature PhD program at U of M. The group's informality, which is partly what distinguishes it from the classroom environment, has provided a comfortable forum for me to gain confidence in speaking about modernist authors and their works. Introducing the group to Finnegans Wake and facilitating discussion of a passage from it was one of the high points of my experience, both because I received thoughtful feedback on a related paper I was writing, and because I understood for the first time the satisfaction of having my peers look at me as "the" expert on a subject that interested everybody. I have appreciated hearing other graduate students share their work in progress, and I found it useful to collaborate with others who were compiling reading lists for prelims. In my view, our program already offers plenty of opportunities to prepare for professionalization; what makes the interest group uniquely appealing is the informality and intimacy of the forum it provides.