Name: Richard Doyle
Position: Professor, English/ Science Technology & Society (STS); Affiliate Faculty Member, Information Sciences and Technology (IST)
Links: College of Liberal Arts Biography
What do you teach?
I teach a wide variety of classes: I have taught everything from English 15 (Freshman Composition) to a course on space colonization and an NSF sponsored course on nanotechnology. The courses cover a wide spectrum, but the core questions are the same: How does our past, present and future use of language frame, condition and enable any particular slice of reality?
This semester that means I am teaching a course on the 20th century U.S. writer Philip K. Dick as well as a course in advanced argumentation and rhetoric that focuses on the ‘discourses of the sacred.’ Dick was a comic, visionary writer who wondered about the nature of any reality that could be computed. He was truly a prophet of our digital age. ‘Composing the Sacred’ is a class in the practice of writing persuasive prose.
Because many students often feel they have nothing to say when asked to write, I have found that focusing the course on scholarly spiritual autobiography opens the floodgates: Almost everyone has a Theory of Everything they use to navigate the world, and writing in response to discourses on the sacred gives them an occasion to discover, articulate, write and revise their implicit map of the world.
Finally, for the third semester in a row I am helping teach a course on the implications of nanotechnology, and again I try to help students get a handle on this interdisciplinary and burgeoning field by focusing on the language we use to describe the nanoscale. ‘Nanonym’ is a word I coined to describe all the new words we are making to describe the nano realm. Many of my other courses can be found here: https://www.personal.psu.edu/rmd12/courses.html
How did you come to Penn State?
I drove here from San Francisco.
But seriously: After completing my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and a Post Doc at MIT, I taught as a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley for a year and went on the job market. I applied for two separate jobs here and was lucky enough to generate some interest.
The day the faculty was to vote on my appointment, the meeting was canceled due to the extreme cold. I waited another week and the faculty voted for my appointment. I have looked at other jobs every now and then, but I have grown to love it here.
What is it about English that you find interesting?
English probably has more words than any other language, and it is now something very close to a global language used to translate between many other languages. It’s a fabulous mixture and very flexible, which can make it difficult to learn.
If languages are one of the patterns by which we organize the world – and they are – English is a big part of how we view and transform the world. It is flexible enough to support different visions of the world, but only if we become aware of and responsible toward our creative role in putting the world into language. Concepts are where it’s at!
Physics describes the physical laws that govern reality, but our interactions with reality to a great extent are patterned, constrained and enabled by language as well as physical forces and regularities.
In what way do you teach your passion for biology?
Communication is one of our core biological activities, and I have long been fascinated by our attempts to put the dynamics of living things into language. ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ are words, and I enjoy helping students realize that the reality of life and consciousness are much more dynamic and interesting than any of our words, which are necessarily partial and useful maps.
Why did you write the book, On Beyond Living?
My research in graduate school focused on the history and language of the Human Genome Project. I wanted to understand what the implications of our new capacities in biotechnology were likely to be, and I found that mapping the language used to describe living systems was a useful way to proceed. The title of the book – which echoes Dr. Seuss’s marvelous ‘On Beyond Zebra’ – suggests that we live in a world where the word ‘life’ is no longer adequate to describe phenomena such as artificial life and some of the more extraordinary ideas of molecular biologists. Nanotechnology has continued this trend with ‘artificial bacteria’ and the like.
What one message do you hope your book conveys most to its readers?
Don’t believe the hype about us being prisoners of our own DNA, but don’t ignore it either!
What has been your biggest accomplishment as a professor of English?
Whenever I am able to help a reader or a student aware of the ways they map, and could otherwise map, reality with language, I have made my biggest accomplishment. I just finished a third book (the first book became a trilogy, with the second published in 2003), and that feels more like an invitation to a fourth book than my biggest accomplishment.
How do your students teach you?
How could they avoid it? Collective intelligence is a real thing – one of the most remarkable perks about being a professor is that you get to collaborate with bright, curious and thoroughly unique people. And when you read a book with a group, or work on a project together, you quickly come to learn (or, at least, you should) that reality is much richer than any version of it you might have comprehended. I learn this over and over. So I think I have learned that with humility and humor, I can continuously learn and develop while pretending to teach.
What is one quote that is most significant to you? Why?
There are a lot of competitors in this category, but one that has been coming back to me a lot lately is from Carl Sagan:
‘We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.’
I think this is a profound realization because it integrates us into the whole 13.7 billion year unfolding of the cosmos since the Big Bang, and gives us a fantastic quest in which to live our life. At the same time, I am sure it is much more interesting than even Sagan describes it: J.B.S. Haldane, a British biologist, famously said that ‘I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’
