Born (Gerald Graff): 1937; (Cathy Birkenstein): 1965.

Education (Gerald Graff): University of Chicago, BA, 1959; Stanford University, PhD, English and American Literature, 1963; (Cathy Birkenstein): Columbia College, Chicago, BA, 1990; Northwestern University, MA, 1992; Loyola University, Chicago, PhD, 2003.

Graff has taught at the University of New Mexico, Northwestern University, the University of California at Irvine and at Berkeley, as well as Ohio State University, Washington University, and the University of Chicago. He has been teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 2000, where he is professor of English and education. Graff was a major contributor to debates about literary theory as well as author of the foremost historical analysis of English departments (Professing Literature). He and his wife, Cathy Birkenstein-Graff, have coauthored the influential writing textbook They Say/I Say.

Publications

Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (1970), Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979), Criticism in the University (1980), Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1993), Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2004), and They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (with Cathy Birkenstein) (2005). Influential articles include “Babbitt at the Abyss,” TriQuarterly (Spring 1975); “The Politics of Anti-Realism,” Salmagundi (Summer-Fall, 1978); “Under Our Belt and Off Our Back” TriQuarterly (Fall, 1981); Essay “Taking Cover in Coverage,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001); and “What We Say When We Don't Talk About Creative Writing,” College English (2009).

Cathy Birkenstein-Graff, a lecturer in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is coauthor with Gerald Graff of They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, coauthor with Graff and Russell Durst of the reader version of that same textbook, and coauthor with Graff of Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment.

She has published articles on writing in College English and, with Gerald Graff, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe and College, Composition, and Communication.

Veeser taped the interview at the home of Cathy Birkenstein-Graff and Gerald Graff in Lincolnwood, Illinois, on July 27, 2015.

HAV: Do you see the legacies of theory in your coauthored writing instruction book, They Say/I Say? Is there a theoretical component there, and what would that be?