This essay considers a student-led protest that took place in 1882 at Syrian Protestant College as a moment of rhetorical negotiation in which (Arab) students unsuccessfully construct and deploy an "imagined America" to speak back to (American) faculty and administrators. This essay's historical analysis helps illustrate the high stakes and implicit promises of transnational knowledge economies today and in the past, as represented in and through the globalization of American-style institutions of higher education and the assumptions about citizenship, and literate practices, that are attached to it.

English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars’ and students’ unfamiliarity with geography and its precepts, or “immappancy.” This article explores the problems presented by immappancy, traces its consequences for scholarly rhetoric, and proposes two pedagogical models that can help us develop our students’ geographical knowledge.

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about contingent faculty’s relations with the profession of English studies in general.