Dr. Christopher Schaberg, Associate Professor of English 
    Marquette Award: "Liberal Arts at Work / After David Foster Wallace"

    At Loyola over the past several years, I have found myself working on two
    seemingly unrelated projects, which have recently come together in the form of
    a new book project.

The title of my book—“Liberal Arts at Work / After David Foster Wallace”—refers to Wallace’s influence on my own teaching, writing, and thinking within the context of the liberal arts, broadly speaking. The core essay in this book, broken up into four parts, is an exploration of the coincidences of literary production and office work, with Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King serving as a linchpin. The other pieces surrounding this essay gravitate in their own ways around Wallace’s work and thought, extending and reexamining many of Wallace’s central concerns. This book—part meditation and part manifesto—is about teaching literature, issues of authorship, and thinking about liberal arts education in the accelerated early twenty-first century, after David Foster Wallace.

I am eager to finish this book and get it into the world because it joins a lively national (and international) conversation about the shifting roles of higher education in the 21st-century. In addition, general interest in the works of David Foster Wallace is on the rise, and I am eager to continue my research and writing on this contemporary author so as to be prepared to teach another seminar on Wallace in the near future. My book approaches these two topics—liberal arts and David Foster Wallace—in surprising ways and in fact merges them for fruitful reflection and consideration.