This article profiles Pearl Buck, an advocate for women's rights and minority children, an author of Chinese history, and a pioneer in many ways. Buck established the Welcome House in 1949 in order to help unadoptable children find families (Conn, 1996). In 1964, Buck founded the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, now Pearl S. Buck International, which…

The recent strike of the Writers' Guild of America (WGA) raised an important issue for academic writers. Although their compensation and job security differ, WGA members and academics both are creators of knowledge and culture. Among academic authors, discussion about dissemination of and access to scholarly works and lamentation about…

To be effective, writers must understand what knowledge they share with the audience and what they do not. Achieving this understanding is made difficult by the knowledge effect--a tendency of individuals to assume that their own knowledge is shared by others. Understanding the knowledge effect and methods for reducing it is potentially useful for…

This paper examines Hermann Hesse's penultimate novel, "The Journey to the East", from an educational point of view. Hesse was a man of the West who turned to the idea of "the East" in seeking to understand himself and his society. While highly critical of elements of Western modernism, Hesse nonetheless viewed "the East" through Western lenses…

Did he or didn't he? The question is vexing Coleridge scholars. Did the author of "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" compose a blank-verse translation of Goethe's "Faust" that was published anonymously in London in 1821? Two prominent Romanticists, Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick, both Americans, believe they…

The life history of a revered writer is summarized. (CK)

When writers write, how do they decide to whom they are speaking? How does this decision affect writers' cognition about writing? Their motivation to write? In this article, I review literature on cognitive and social processes of writing, conceptualizations of audience, writing across distinct learning environments, and writers' motivations. I…

Roy Richard Grinker started his training in psychiatry before he hit puberty, listening to his grandfather discuss the field. Later, Grinker rejected the idea of studying science, eventually settling into his current job as a professor of anthropology at George Washington University. But the academic wanderings over the years have brought him…

Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) discovered a "curious" method for computing determinants. It is an iterative process that uses determinants of 2 x 2 submatrices of a matrix to obtain a smaller matrix. When the process ends, the result is the determinant of the original matrix. This article discusses both the algorithm and what may have led Dodgson…

This paper provides updates from some of the student authors whose research appeared in the first two Undergraduate Research Special Issues. These updates serve as testimony to the ongoing impact of the study abroad experience, and inspire everyone involved with study abroad, administrators, faculty, and students, to value the distinctiveness of…

When Don Imus made his infamous comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team in 2007, he provoked widespread (yet short-lived) attention to the circulation of language practices demeaning to women of color. In an elective autobiographical writing course that the author designed with and for urban high school girls, the students…

Writing in 1995 for the "Harvard Business Review" audience of executive managers, Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen coined the term "disruptive technologies" to describe innovations that improve a product, service, or operation in ways wholly unanticipated by leaders of existing markets. Christensen's economic theory offers a launch…

The "Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior" was founded in 1958 by a group of male psychologists, mainly from the northeastern USA and connected with either Harvard or Columbia. Fifty years later about 20% of both editors and authors reside outside this country and almost the same proportion is women. Other changes in the…

Writing in personal genres, like autobiography, leads writers to public voices. Public voice is a discursive quality of a text that conveys the writer's authority and position relative to others. To show how voice and authority depend on genre, I analyze the autobiographies of two writers who take opposing positions on the same topic. By producing…