Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now: A Conversation with Sarah Mesle and Jeff Dolven

Join the Princeton Writing Program’s Public Scholarship Initiative for a conversation between Sarah Mesle and Jeff Dolven about Mesle’s new book, Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now. They will discuss what humanities writing can do both within and beyond the halls of the university. Mesle’s book offers a passionate defense of humanistic writing and the communities it inspires. Whether you are finishing your dissertation, revising your first book manuscript, or publishing in magazines, we welcome you to a discussion about the sustaining capacity of what Mesle calls humanists’ “expressions of excellently nerdy granular attention.”

Read Sarah’s article “Who Is Your Girl? Where Is She Going?” in Lit Hub

Sarah Mesle is a professor of writing at the University of Southern California. The former senior humanities editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is also a regular contributor, Mesle is the founding coeditor of the digital magazine Avidly and the short-book series Avidly Reads. Her book Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women’s Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity is forthcoming from Beacon Press (Aug 2026). Mesle’s writing has also appeared in venues ranging from The Chronicle of Higher Education, to Studies in American Fiction to InStyle to The New York Times Magazine.

Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance, in the Princeton English Department. He has written three books of criticism, Scenes of Instruction (Chicago 2007), Senses of Style (Chicago 2018), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet 2017), as well as essays on a variety of subjects, including Renaissance metrics, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare’s reading, Fairfield Porter, and player pianos. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals in the US and the UK and in a volume, Speculative Music (Sarabande 2013). He is also an editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine, and was the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM).

Presented by Princeton Writing Program’s Public Scholarship Initiative and co-sponsored by the Princeton Humanities Initiative and the Department of English. Sponsorship of an event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.