‘Studying English allows you to see the particularities of life’: Chandler Fry on literature, teaching, the good life

You’re reading The Alcove, an interview series with artists and scholars affiliated with Duke University, including students, faculty and alumni in the arts and humanities. Inspired by the style and format of The Paris Review. 

Chandler Fry knows what he’s doing. 

After graduating from UNC Chapel Hill Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in English Language and Literature, he received a Ph.D. in English from Duke in 2021. During his time at the University, he published twice in national journals and received three teaching awards. Under the supervision of Professor David Aers, Fry wrote his doctoral dissertation on “​​Reasoning Rebellion and Reformation: Natural Law and the Ethics of Power and Resistance in Late Medieval English Literature.” 

Despite his accolades, Fry, like many a humanities Ph.D, faced an unforgiving employment landscape. Over the course of a year, Fry applied for 297 jobs, ultimately landing a full-time position at Piedmont Community College in Roxboro, a job he has described as “a happy place.” He eloquently detailed his ordeal and the lessons learned in an article for Duke’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In 2024, he was voted the Best Community College teacher in Roxboro by the readers of The Courier Times.

Our conversation spanned topics ranging from the value of an English major to the definition of a good life. By the end of this interview, you will know what Fry means when he says that nothing just seems particular — it is particular. 

The Chronicle (TC): Let’s start from the beginning. Why did you decide to major in English at UNC?

Chandler Fry (CF): It felt, in some ways, like it was decided for me. It was something that I was good at, and I felt like it made me understand the world in a better way. In high school, I would look to the text I was reading for answers. I wanted to be able to think about my life in a way that was clear. And I thought that English gave me that, so that’s what drew me to it originally. 

TC: Right. More broadly, why should we study English? Why should some college student who wants to major in economics take an English elective? 

TC: Or just the legitimacy of the major itself. 

CF In terms of employability, I think we’re at a crisis, because the market speaks entirely in terms of skills. Seeing humans with particularity can’t be categorized as a skill. If you walk into an interview, and they ask what you can bring to the table and you say that, they’re probably not going to hire you.

In terms of rigor, no. I don’t have doubts. I think it’s certainly a different kind of thinking than you might do in a math class or a science class. But that doesn’t delegitimize it. The market is what tries to delegitimize it, and that ramifies down to the perception of the major itself. We spend all day doing something that’s not “objective” or “measurable,” and that’s anathema to market logic. And to me, that points to a cultural problem. How have we gotten to the point where learning about ourselves, about our moral formation, is seen as not doing anything?

TC: Right. You completed your Ph.D in English at Duke. Can you tell me what you think humanities doctoral programs will look like in the next ten years?

CF: That’s a very scary question. I’ve talked to people who’ve completed a Ph.D in English recently. I’ve talked to David Aers, who was my mentor at Duke, and Michael Cornett, who runs the Center for Medieval and Renaissance studies, and have asked them: what is the Ph.D going to look like in ten years? I don’t know. I think it’s a possibility that lots of PhD programs vanish. When I started at Duke, they tended to take around ten students, and now I think they’re down to four or five. So it’s contracted, even at a place like Duke. What does that mean for universities that aren’t as highly ranked?

TC: Back when you were a student in the doctoral program, did you feel that these changes were already happening?

CF: I was always conscious that it was going to be a difficult road to get a job. We’re all told that out of the gate. But a belief was that if you go to a place like Duke, then you would hopefully end up with a tenure-track job eventually. And that has shifted. That shifted across the six years that I was there. I graduated right as COVID was probably at its worst, and the market was beginning to react to that reality. So maybe I’m not as good a barometer as somebody who’s going through the program now. But from my cohort, there are very few of us who ended up in tenure-track jobs — there might not be any —and that’s always the goal with a place like Duke. Things have been on a downward slope for a long time, but I think it’s just gotten worse. 

Does that change anything for how I see Ph.D programs? I would still do the Ph.D. I would just reframe how I think about it. Primarily, at Duke, I was thinking, “Oh, I need to do this in order to make myself more attractive for jobs.” Now, I think about it differently. Now I think, “Well, I did these things in order to shape myself as a human being.” So if I hear people who say, “I want to do a doctorate in English,” then that’s what I tell them they need to do.

TC: And not to do it just as a stepping stone to a career in academia.

CF: Correct. 

TC: Now, I noticed a good half of your doctoral dissertation was dedicated to the works of Chaucer. I think it’s a challenge for a lot of people to venture into Middle English literature, because of the differences in language, the cultural context and the attention and time it demands. What is the best advice you would give to someone who’s interested but maybe a little scared to try reading medieval literature? 

CF: Honestly, I was scared. When I was an undergrad at UNC, I spent most of my time as an English major avoiding the Chaucer class because I was like, “Oh no, that's so weird.” Then I took it and, as with everything, having a great teacher means everything. I had a great teacher, and what he was able to do was to present the stuff about the medieval period that’s very alien, and to say, “actually this — this shows us who we are.” Thinking about the alien as a foil to us today, there’s value in that. There’s extreme value in that. 

So for somebody who’s interested in medieval but is scared of it, like I was, I would just say to go in with the mindset that you can learn something about yourself by encountering something so very different from yourself. 

TC: I’ll keep an eye out for them. Now, the other half of your dissertation was devoted to Thomas Usk. I’ve heard of Chaucer, but I have absolutely never heard of Usk. Can you give us an elevator pitch of why we should consider reading him? Who even is Usk? 

CF: Most people don’t know Usk. When I was an undergrad, I didn’t know who Usk was either. He has something of an unusual life, in that he is not thought of as a tremendously great writer on the level of somebody like Chaucer or Langland, but he wrote within a charged, very dangerous political environment, where he was thrown into jail and eventually executed. And what always interested me about him was that, while in jail, he wrote this great political work that attempted to reconcile his life with the political theory available to him at the moment. 

Usk applied political theory in a way that, to me, speaks most urgently about his moment. Reading him, I was always able to get a sense of political theory in action and its relations to ideology. Going back to the notion of encountering the alien, the political theory itself was different, always, but how it’s applied, the way it manifests culturally, I could see ourselves there. So that interested me about him. 

TC: In that same vein, in our era of binge-watching TV and doom-scrolling TikToks, what makes medieval literature exciting?

CF: First and foremost, the moment to slow down. Because encountering something so alien — if you’re going to do it seriously, I think you have to slow down and really take it into account. Really study the differences. How often in our culture are we afforded moments where we can just slow down and think? It’s very, very rare. We are always being asked to produce more and more, faster and faster.

TC: And what keeps you up at night?

CF: [laughs] That’s a long list. 

To borrow a phrase from Lauren Groff, I think we exist at a moment where it feels like “everything is decaying faster than we can love it.” The everyday experience of it is like a slow cancellation of the future. I guess what worries me most is that everything I think that’s beautiful about life will either be eliminated or slowly contracted into almost nothing. For example, we could confront a reality where something like the African penguin will just cease to exist. The conference I’m organizing at Duke with Maci Mize is a response to this almost oppressive concern. We’re trying to imagine the forms life takes when we live with these massive crises that feel bigger than us all. Given these crises, what constitutes a good life? What does that look like? Maybe it looks a lot different than what’s been called a good life for a hundred years. We think conversations about this are urgent. I’m privileged to work with Maci on this because she’s lived and worked in the Amazon Rainforest in Peru. She thinks about her life in relation to the preservation of what she finds beautiful about our world. She lives an answer to these questions. 

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