Richard Utz, professor and chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, was invited to contribute a paper on "Rhetoric as a New Paradigm for English Studies" by the Modern Language Association (MLA) Division on the History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition.

The paper, a response based on Utz's experience as the "English literature" person at a major technological research institution, is to be presented at the 2014 annual meeting of the MLA in Chicago.

His thought experiment, which asked whether colleges and universities need English departments at all, extended previous deliberations published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The paper, "Quo vadis, English Studies?", appears in one of Germany's most widely read open access journals, Philologie im Netz (Free University of Berlin).