Michael Shuman
Visiting Instructor

Contact

Office: CPR 358-F
Phone: 813/974-5763
Email:

Links

• Website
• Curriculum Vitae

Bio

I am a Visiting Instructor in the Department of English at University of South Florida in Tampa, and I specialize in Technical/Professional communications. You'll find me discussing issues related to technical and professional communications pedagogy, especially in terms of bringing an appreciation of "real world" applications to students enveloped in formal study and perhaps not aware of the types of issues and situations encountered in the workplace. In the Fall 2007 semester, I'll be concentrating on teaching Communications for Engineers, and my comments will pertain primarily to the challenges of students who will enter the engineering profession in just a year or two. Learning to communicate technical information in a clear and concise manner will be essential for these students-turned-engineers.

While my primary academic concern right now is engineering communications, my doctorate is in literature, and you'll also find me discussing a wide range of issues related to 19th Century British Literature as well as to modernism. I'll provide access to a blog encouraging discussion of literary issues, and I'll also offer links to websites and other works I find important in my areas of interest.

Access to other pages of this website will be available shortly, as will the search utility (right now an inoperative box in the upper right had side of this page).

Right now I'm working on a book about the psychoanalyst Otto Rank and the relationship between his ideas and the literary modernism movement. Rank was one of Freud's closest associates, but eventually split away from his mentor's ideas to offer insight into the human mind that is at once more spiritual and abstract than the prevailing Freudian model

I'm also working on a textbook that I will eventually use in my Communications for Engineers classes. A few such texts are already available, but generally these are out-of-date in terms of computers and the Internet, too simplistic in their approach to a complex subject, or both. One exception is the third edition of Pocket Book of Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists by Leo Finkelstein, Jr. I'm using this text in my classes this semester.

Current Courses