May 17, 2018

Recommendation: Danielle Bauman-Epstein

I write this letter to offer my strongest possible recommendation for Danielle Bauman-
Epstein for a teaching job at your school. I base the following comments on having
known Danielle since she entered the PhD program at UIC; she took a class with me on
British Romanticism. She also worked with me as a Teaching Assistant in my English 242
class, a course on the History of British Literature from 1660 to 1900.

I can confidently say that Danielle is one of the best students and best teachers that I’ve
seen in over 20 years of teaching graduate students. For sure in the top 5. She was
initially concentrating on nineteenth century British Literature, and produced superbly
argued, beautifully written work in that field: she wrote a particularly memorable essay
on Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative. I thought that she could publish this work, do a
dissertation on literature, and get a job at a college or university. She shifted gears,
however, and did her work in English Education. My understanding is that she has
excelled tremendously in her teaching at the high school level. Danielle’s brilliance,
patience, compassion, and attention to detail—in my opinion—are qualities that would
transfer to excellent work anywhere.

In the class that Danielle worked as a TA for me, she was beloved by her students
because of her passionate attention to them as learners, interlocutors, and writers. The
class required weekly discussion groups for which the TAs were responsible; those
discussions followed my own lectures (two per week). I also asked the TAs to deliver one
lecture during the semester. Danielle’s performance was stunning in both of these
capacities, demonstrating a wisdom and skill as a teacher that exceeded that of far more
seasoned teachers.

When I visited Danielle’s classes on Percy Shelley’s poetry, I was amazed by how she
managed to walk her students through a discussion of terribly challenging poetry and
open it up for deep understanding and appreciation. She devoted a rigorous attention to
figurative language as she probed deeper and deeper into individual lines, prompting her
students with perfectly pitched questions that encouraged a lively conversation. She also
masterfully guided them toward an understanding of larger themes in the poetry that
made sense of the more local observations—a tall order even for very experienced
readers or teachers. All of this seemed to be managed so beautifully because of
Danielle’s generous and caring disposition toward her students, which clearly made them
feel as if their observations were not merely welcomed but important and valuable.
Teaching evaluations for very talented graduate students are usually good in our
program, but Danielle’s are truly outstanding: her students in my class described her as
“one of the best” TAs at UIC, and “the most a TA has ever . . . engaged the class.” They
continually remark upon her accessibility and helpfulness with writing. Like the very best
of teachers, she worked with her students’ ideas and wove them into coherent
arguments: as one student remarks, “our responses were always appreciated. . . . She
took the time to understand and articulate our positions.”

I will quickly add here that Danielle’s lecture on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles
was also superb. Even in the large lecture format, she was able to engage the roughly 80
students in the class; she pitched the lecture perfectly at the skill level of her students by
talking about the different kinds of naming in the novel—the naming of individual
characters, families, and bloodlines. This connected with some of the larger themes of
personal, institutional, and cosmic relationships that we were studying in the class, and
thus Danielle was able to connect to large issues while pointing to very specific and
fascinating parts of the text.

I hope this letter conveys what a gifted and mature teacher Danielle is: any school would
be lucky to have her, and I’m looking forward to the wonderful things she’ll do with, and
for, generations of students in the future.

Mark E. Canuel
Professor, Department of English
Director, Institute for the Humanities