Interview with Peggy Phelan and Gavin Jones on New Critical-Creative Studies Initiative

The English department launched a new initiative at the beginning of the 2025-26 academic year, called the Critical-Creative Studies Initiative (CCSI). Peggy Phelan will serve as the CCSI Director during its pilot phase. In the interview below, Peggy Phelan and Gavin Jones, Chair of the English Department, discuss this exciting new initiative.

Question: What is CCSI?

Peggy Phelan: CCSI stands for Critical-Creative Studies Initiative, a 4-year pilot program, focused on developing undergraduate courses that invite students to fuse critical and creative work within the same class. This fusion has been a key driver of some contemporary literature,  in fiction and in literary criticism and theory. It's important for educational institutions to address some of these changes, both in terms of noticing what these changes are and what motivates them. Part of that motivation stems from the sense that we need a more robust attention to both fact and fiction in our increasingly complicated world.

Gavin Jones: I think that the hyphen does a lot of work in critical-creative, you know, it's all about the hyphen in a way. It's one word. We're not just slamming the critical into the creative, we're really trying to fuse them and think of something which is in itself critical-creative. So how is the creative act also a critical act? How is the critical act also a creative response to imaginative, artistic material?

Question: What led to the creation of this initiative?

Peggy Phelan: When I began teaching the English Department’s core “Poetry and Poetics” class, I noticed that many undergraduates approached poetry as fairly confident poets, and fairly timid literary critics. That difference caught my attention. I began to think that we could combine this required class with an optional creative-critical writing workshop that paralleled the lectures. So, for example, when the Poetry and Poetics lectures were focused on Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Keats’ odes, the workshop would be offering opportunities for students to write their own sonnets and odes, while taking up the scholarly content of the lectures and readings. So that was the seed of the idea: to give students opportunities to braid together their creative and their critical work. Instead of keeping these skills separate, it makes sense to combine the two approaches to literature. 

Gavin Jones: Teaching with creative writers, I became very interested in how they teach writing, because they have a very rigorous pedagogy. It's very incremental, and I think on the scholarly critical side of things, we could do a better job laddering our courses. We tend to assume that students understand what literary criticism is, why it's so important, what its history is, how it's been so influential; but they don't necessarily have that kind of foreknowledge, or that background. I love the way that creative writers teach - introductory classes, followed by intermediate classes, then advanced classes, and even within single classes there are incremental writing exercises. I'm co-teaching a class in the spring in CCSI on contemporary American short stories, and I'm really gonna make an effort this year to bring what I contribute to that class into line with the creative writing pedagogy, so we're building critical essays and critical interpretations creatively from the ground up. That's the braiding idea that Peggy mentioned. Throughout the class, we're going to be making it longer and longer through intertwining these two aspects.

Question: Are there other aspects of CCSI courses that you would like to highlight? 

Peggy Phelan: Yes, I often think that the tremendous resources that Stanford offers are not fully taken up by undergraduate courses in English. I have been pleased to see that several CCSI courses are offering a wide range of what I like to call “local field trips.” For example, students in Bernardo Hinojosa’s class in “Medieval Ecologies,” will be visiting Stanford’s beautiful campus gardens and Keith Ekiss’ CCSI course, “Poetry and Magic” is planning a class visit to “Cunning Folk: Witchcraft, Magic and the Occult,” on view now at the Cantor Art Center. Esther Yu’s class, “Page to Stage: The Case of Shakespeare’s Richard III,” offers students a chance to put on a staged reading of Shakespeare’s play and students have already had class visits from TAPS’ artist in residence, Amy Freed, and from a TAPS PhD candidate and fine director, Adin Walker. I like this kind of pedagogy because it allows students to write about literature while bringing to bear their own experiences. CCSI courses are making explicit connections between what students are reading and their lives on campus.  

Gavin Jones: It'll be interesting to see how the subject matter of these courses evolves over time as well. Potentially you could make any course a CCSI course, I suppose, but I'm not sure it's going to work out that way. I think that certain subject matters will lend themselves to these kinds of courses. Peggy's been doing all of the careful work with the CCSI lecturers developing these courses; the subject matters are inherently interesting and I don't think that's a coincidence. 

Peggy Phelan: John Evans, for example, is teaching a course on autobiographical writing, scheduled for Winter quarter – I know undergraduates will be attracted to this topic. He's often taught classes like this in his capacity as a creative writer lecturer, but now he's bringing critical literature on memoir, auto-theory, and creative nonfiction to bear on life writing, and I think that's really exciting. 

Gavin Jones:  In the class that I co-teach with Jenn Trahan on Contemporary American Short Stories, we do a mini-workshop in that class. It's not really enough time to do a full workshop, but still it’s an overwhelming experience, because the undergraduates are totally enthralled with the intensity of this workshop moment, where they're helping each other, responding to each other's writing. It's a very real thing, and it's something that they care about very deeply. Over the past few years I've had creative assignments in my just regular English classes; I think quite a few faculty do that, in which we’re not teaching creative writing but we will give the students an opportunity to rewrite a scene from the perspective of a minor character, or some other creative act, and then they reflect on it critically. I noticed a profound difference in the amount of care that students would take with their creative work, and the care that they would take with their critical work, even at the level of the polish of individual sentences. That really impressed me, and I want to take that degree of care and apply it to the critical work, and to the critical-creative work. There is a kind of ethical sort of ethos behind this. It's one of responsibility. Respect for the work that is being done.

Question: What do you see for the future of CCSI?

Gavin Jones: It's a bellwether for changes that Peggy described earlier as well, and I think that there are other instantiations of the critical-creative at other institutions, and also at Stanford as well.

Peggy Phelan: One reason I'm excited by CCSI is that it invites people from so many different departure points to participate. I am sure that it will continue to grow and change over time. I would like CCSI to offer more classes devoted to the ecological literature and a few classes that take up the extraordinary literary archives held by Stanford Special Collections. CCSI is open to ideas and dreams from faculty and students alike. Most faculty have a course they have been thinking about but have not yet had a chance to develop. I hope that CCSI can nudge some of these “in my back pocket” courses forward. The future is coming and it's good to be on the early train.

NEW CCSI Winter & Spring Courses:

Winter: 

English 8H: Autobiographical Writing (John Evans)

Spring: 

English 8F: Science Fiction: Time (Travel) in Narrative (Keith Ekiss)

English 8G: Climate Lit: Survival, Activism, and Writing ’the Natural World’ (Scott Hutchins)

English 8J: American Sports Literature: Critical and Personal Perspectives (John Evans)

English 177B: Contemporary American Short Stories (Gavin Jones & Jenn Trahan)