Please join us on Tuesday, January 20, 4-6 PM in Humanities
Gateway 1010 for a conversation between Jonathan Alexander, Chair
of English, and Sarah Mesle, Professor at USC, about Sarah’s new
book, Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now
(UChicago, 2025).
This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the
creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise.
Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises that
undermine higher education at every turn, what can still motivate
humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy,
Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and
publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why
humanities writing matters.
Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community,
but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both
our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional
advice—including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching
publications, and managing writing anxiety—readers will find an account
of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual
commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how
university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader
range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s
community-building potential and makes them better able to value their
own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues,
or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche,
weird, or beloved, objects of study.
Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of
writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between
writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s
honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and
Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds
their writing can make.
Sarah Mesle is a professor, writer, and editor based in Los Angeles,
California. She is faculty at USC, the former Senior Humanities Editor of
the Los Angeles Review of Books, founding co-editor of the LARB
channel Avidly and the NYU short book series Avidly Reads. Prior to
arriving at USC, she held post-doctoral fellowships in English at the
University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mesle’s many essays about writing, literature, gender, television, and
more have appeared in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher
Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Talking Points Memo,
Guernica, InStyle magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. She is
a nineteenth-century Americanist by training and is interested, generally
speaking, in the long strange history of the American novel and in the
many ways popular culture can excite, estrange, and surprise.