An Interview with Padma Rangarajan
with Kacie L. Wills and Olivia Loksing Moy
June 10, 2024
Co-editors Olivia Loksing Moy and Kacie L. Wills had the pleasure of speaking with Padma Rangarajan, professor and author of Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century , about using commonplace books in her course for non-majors at UC, Riverside.
Olivia Loksing-Moy: Would you tell us about the class you taught last year?
Padma Rangarajan: I should begin by saying that I was not interested in commonplacing at all until I saw the Keats-Shelley Association page about the project. And even then I was somewhat skeptical.
I have an ambivalent relationship with projects, as opposed to essays. But I saw the page about commonplacing and my interest was piqued.
Shortly before the class last fall, I had met with a grad student who's doing a master's in English, but who actually has an M.S. in biotechnology. In the course of our conversation, she said 2 things that I thought were very, very interesting. The first was that the biggest difference that she noticed between engineering and English is that in engineering, the field is full of optimism, and she didn't get that sense from our discipline. The second thing that she said that I thought was even more interesting was that in engineering classes you work to produce something, and she didn't feel like in English classes there's anything that's produced at the end. I was taken aback, because the essay is the thing you produce, right? And then it dawned on me that not everyone might fetishize the essay in the same way that I do. I also think that some of it has to do with the fact that when I was an undergraduate, you printed out your essay, stapled it, walked over to the instructor’s office, and stuck it under their door or put it in their mailbox. There was a sense of completion. And now everything is so virtual that I think the process is very intangible in a way that is not useful for students. So, I had all those things in the back of my head when I was planning this class on Romantic ecologies.
It was a 60 person class for majors, but of the students who took the class, I would say maybe 2 of them were familiar with the period and the other 58 knew very little about Romanticism or the early 19th century. So, I thought that the commonplacing project would be a good way for them to really engage with the poetry. This is the other thing I forgot to mention: that most of them came in without a lot of confidence in or practice with analyzing poetry, so I thought that having a commonplacing project would be a good way for them to engage with the texts.
It also seemed to me to complement the other, small class project I had assigned in tandem with reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals. I asked students to spend 45 minutes outside with no devices and just sit there and observe. Then they had to write about the experience, incorporating ideas and quotations from the Journals or from excerpts from Keats’s travel journals in Scotland, which they also read. The commonplacing project, for which they had to hand write everything, was also a way for them to engage with tactile, real, tangible things. There was also an archival element to the commonplacing project.
Both the students and I were very surprised at how useful it seemed to be to them.
Commonplace book of a gentleman resident in Jamaica, ca. May 1817 - Nov. 1818. F1870.C66 1817. Special Collections & University Archives, University of California, Riverside.
OLM: I think it's so amazing, this connection you make across disciplines.The first time I heard Jillian Hess, who wrote the book on 19th century commonplace books, give a talk, and in her book as well, she always starts with Enlightenment scientists and really takes her time to go through those scientific logbook, from John Locke to Michael Faraday. It's so interesting that for you, bringing commonplace books into your class was, in part, reacting to the expectations of a science student.
Could you speak more about the archival aspect of your commonplacing assignment?
PR: Yes. One of the things that I realized was that I never really defined what I meant by a commonplace book, partly because commonplacing is far outside my research expertise. I assumed that my students would be similarly confused. So, I had them visit the UC Riverside Special Collections.
MS. Commonplace-book, 1820-1839. PN6245.D8 1839. Special Collections & University Archives, University of California, Riverside.
The archivist shared a compilation of commonplace books with the students, and they had a whole class period where they read them and looked at handwriting. Some of the books had illustrations, and some didn't. Some were more scientific. There was a wide range–I think a couple of them were actually contemporary, while several of them were from our period (the nineteenth century). I think being in the archive helped students get a sense of what it was I meant by a commonplace book, plus they had a chance to interact with period materials. There was no grade for this part of the project; it was just something I had them do as one of the project’s components.
OLM: Were there any parameters that you set going in? Such as whether they had to write about certain topics or if they could free write? I'm also curious to hear about how you graded writing tasks.
PR: They had to have a minimum of 15 entries over the 10 week class. There was no maximum. Some of them did more, but not that many more. The entries all had to be handwritten and each week of readings needed to be represented, or at least every couple of weeks need to be represented, because what I didn't want was for students to simply go through the last week of classes and have 15 entries from a single text. There had to be some amount of spread across the quarter. There were no sort of artistic parameters, though it was very striking to me that I had many students who did really beautiful projects, which was great. It was really fun to see.
But, the bulk of the grading was based on an introduction that had three parts. The first, which I only graded for completion, was to reflect on their process and explain how they chose their quotes. The two graded sections had to do with actual analysis. First, they had to talk about any thematic elements that they noticed in their quotes and how these related to Romanticism or anything that we talked about in the course. Then, they needed to discuss the quotes within the context of the primary texts that we had read together. Other than that, as long as they had the entries, they got full credit for that piece of the assignment. Then, on the last day of class I had them bring in their commonplace books. They didn't need to be finished, but they needed to be somewhat complete. And then, we had an open house. With the large number of students, the best I could do was assign them to talk to at least 2 other students and look at their commonplace books. They had to fill out a worksheet where they recorded what the other students did, the authors they had in common, what they didn't have in common, what they noticed, etc. And then they got credit for basically doing that work and turning it in.
Mariela Alvarez commonplace book extract
Kacie Wills: Do you see yourself using this in other types of courses in the future, based on how well it seems to have encouraged students to engage with the texts?
PR: Definitely. I'm teaching a version of this course this coming fall, but this is going to be a 15 person course for incoming freshmen through the honors college. I'm really excited to teach it in that class because I think it'll be particularly useful for those students as a way of connecting with the poetry, thinking about questions of form and structure, etc. I’m always a little skeptical when students praise an assignment because in the back of my mind I'm always wondering whether they are angling for a good grade, but a number of students did seem to genuinely enjoy the project. And I was struck by how many students remarked that having to write things out by hand allowed them to really appreciate the poetry in a way that they wouldn't have otherwise. I will tweak some things for this upcoming course because it's a smaller class, so I have a little bit more freedom, but I'm interested to see if this will be replicated with a totally different population of students.
OLM: Could you take a moment to characterize the demographic of students at your UC campus?
PR: UC Riverside is a Hispanic Serving Institution with primarily first gen students, almost all of whom have to work while they're at school to pay for tuition.
OLM: A lot of us ask, what's the difference between a commonplace book and just a notebook? And there is that luxury component, the luxury of time and indulging that has been added into the commonplace book. Did you still assign a paper at the end of the semester, and did you find that the commonplacing really did make them better analyzers of poetry? Because what you described includes all these steps: it breaks down the excerpting, copying, analyzing, contextualizing, and then connecting the literature. It forces them to do all that.
Did you feel like you had a better “product” of that fetishized essay at the end? I'm adding this because I think a lot of students this year especially were the students who suffered the most learning loss from the pandemic and they didn't know how to take notes, so many of us found ourselves teaching a study skill that in the past you could assume students had.
PR: Yes. I did a lot of intensive work on close reading and reading poetry with the students. So the commonplacing project was useful in terms of reinforcing things that I was trying to teach them about. It's one thing if you're analyzing poetry on the board and talking through it, but I’d like to think that having to choose and copy lines was a different and useful way of reinforcing all of the work that we did across the quarter.
OLM: Did you assign an anthology or textbook for this course?
PR: No, they had a course reader; it was pretty eclectic.
KW: Could you speak to the question of visibility in relation to commonplacing? I'm also at an HSI, and I think these questions are so important to the student population that we're working with, like helping them feel seen as scholars and contributors to academic conversations in the same way that commonplacing can help us see and access texts and the thoughts of people who aren't necessarily part of a visible canon.
April Quach commonplace book extract
PR: One of the things that the students seemed intrigued by was that they were the first people to look at many of the books in the archive. UC Riverside does not have an astounding collection, and it doesn't have any particular strengths in this period. When I was talking to the archivist and we pulled things from the collections, she mentioned this was the first time that these books had ever been pulled. I repeated that to the students, and that made a real impression on them. I do think that helped them feel like this work was a different kind of scholarly production that was useful, and it allowed them to engage with texts that get buried in the archive. I think they were pleased to be the first people to look at and study these artifacts, and I do think the process of that was meaningful to the students.
OLM: In the context of a Women in Literature class I recently taught, I told students on the first day, “Yes, typically someone might teach these 10 major authors to make up their syllabus. But we're going to be reading commonplace books this term, some by unknown or anonymous women, and when you copy over their words into your own commonplace book and spend time with them, and then you recite it out loud, it's like you're bringing that woman back from the obscurity, and her voice lives on. So, we talked a lot about erasure and invisibility. When you select a passage written in this person's hand and then you copy it in your own hand, there's this whole ghostly reliving.
PR: That is so great. I am going to steal that for the next time I teach this. I cannot thank you enough for doing this project. It has been tremendously beneficial to me.
About the Author
Padma Rangarajan is an Associate Professor at the University of California (Riverside) who specializes in nineteenth-century British Literature, particularly the literature and history of empire. She is the author of Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (Fordham), a study of the literary legacy of translation policy in the British Empire, particularly India. Her current project, “Thug Life: The British Empire and the Birth of Terrorism,” locates the origins of modern terrorism in imperial law and culture. Her other areas of interest include religion, travel literature, ecocriticism, and archipelagic studies. She is on the K-SAA Board of Directors.