Opinion

Carlo Rotella is director of American Studies and professor of English at Boston College. He is the author of Cut Time, Good With Their Hands, and October Cities. He writes for the New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post Magazine, he is a regular columnist for the Boston Globe and a commentator for WGBH FM, and his work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The American Scholar, Harper’s, DoubleTake, Boston, Slate, The Believer, and The Best American Essays. He has held Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships and received the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, The American Scholar’s prizes for Best Essay and Best Work by a Younger Writer, and two U.S. Speaker and Specialist Grants from the State Department to lecture in China and Bosnia.