Daniel Schwartz, PhD'25, English
Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Assumption University
January 12, 2026
Can you describe your career path and how it has led to your current work?
I’ve known for a long time that I ideally wanted to be a professor. I did a philosophy master’s after college and one week of a Philosophy PhD in San Diego; then I dropped out, moved back to Boston, applied to English PhD programs, and ended up at Brandeis. I pretty much knew from the get-go that I wanted to try to teach, do research, and be a professor. It’s an uphill battle since obviously there aren’t a lot of jobs. My first time on the job market in the fall of 2024, I hadn’t heard anything by the end of the spring of 2025 and had resigned myself to basically not having a job for this year and having to cobble things together. Then I got an interview at Assumption in May 2025, and it ended up working out.
I also did some teaching at Brandeis. I taught a section of UWS and an English class I designed called “What is it Like to Be an Animal?” Both were great experiences, and I knew I wanted to keep teaching and learning to be a teacher, which is a process I still feel like I’m very early in. This fall, I taught three classes, and this spring, I’ll be teaching four. It’s a very different experience from teaching just one!
What does a typical day/week look like for you in this position?
I don’t have advising duties as a visiting assistant professor, so it’s basically teaching and office hours. This coming semester, I’ll be teaching five days a week and four different classes: one first-year writing class, two introduction to literature classes (which will be similar but not identical), and a class called “The 1920s” (focusing on modernism, which is my field). On a typical day, I head to Assumption pretty early and get there around 9:30. I teach three to four hours, have a few hours of office hours, and come home and do lesson prep.
One of the nice things about Assumption is I have pretty much total freedom with the syllabus design for all the different classes, so I get to teach what I want. Last semester, I taught first-year writing and the theme was evil, so we looked at evil characters in literature and also some true crime. (A few students became wonderfully obsessed with Dostoevsky’s underground man.) Students were interested in the topic and had a lot of fun with the readings. This semester, I’m taking a very different approach – less thematic and more based around different writing skills and aspects of successful academic writing. I think it’s important to generate some basic enthusiasm about writing and the exciting intellectual and expressive possibilities that emerge when we start to discover our voices as writers, so that will be our focus this semester.
What skills from your Brandeis degree have you found most valuable in your current work?
It was great to be able to teach a few classes at Brandeis. I think I would have been really nervous about being thrown into a classroom otherwise! The whole process of the PhD and learning how to do a multi-year research project also requires you to be very good at being your own boss and deadline setter, to manage your time well, and to be patient through ups and downs. Those challenges aren’t exactly what you face in teaching, but I think the process gave me confidence and the kinds of organizational skills that are needed to be a successful teacher. When writing your dissertation, you get really deep in your project, so when you come up for air and are teaching college freshmen, you need to remember how to approach some of these texts in a more basic, fundamental way. Why should they want to read this stuff? What will it do for them when they are living and thinking about their own lives?
What advice do you have for current students as they embark on their career exploration or job search?
I think it’s worth trying a lot of different things. If someone thinks they might want to be a professor, I would recommend teaching at Brandeis and making use of that opportunity. See what teaching is like and if you like it. It’s a really challenging job market, but I am still glad I struggled through it; I am on it again since this is a one-year job. You never know what’s going to happen – you could end up with a job, and if you really love thinking about, reading, and teaching literature, give it a shot. It might lead you to something else you didn’t anticipate. I think being able to spend time reading and thinking about books is a wonderful luxury, so I would encourage people to stick with it if they love it!