Maura Spiegel

Spiegel co taught this course with Professor Roosevelt Montas (he carried the class for me), which at times was confusing. Spiegel is super into films so most of her lectures were about movies. She is clearly passionate about the films she picked, however her lectures are really boring. She reads from a script, which is fine, but sometimes it's super obvious and feels weird. Since she usually lectures about movies, she is constantly walking back and forth to the light switch to switch them on/off so we can watch clips from the movie, this bothered me even though it really shouldn't. Her tone is very monotonous, which makes her lectures boring and hard to follow what she is saying.

I came into this clas hopeful about English at Barnard and looking at the prospect of becoming an English major. Post-Maura there’s absolutely no way I’ll be an English major. Not only was there an unnecessary amount of work—she gave us one book per week but often didn’t assign the reading until late in the week (eg Thursday or after for a Monday class) but she was also the type of teacher who seems to see critical writing as a place with lots of definites. Our discussions revolved around her lecturing us, and when she did allow us to talk it often seemed as she was simply waiting for us to hit all the bullet points on her checklist. Several times she blatantly told myself and other classmates that our points were invalid; which to me, is not the beauty at all of English. On top of that, she gave no guidelines and even gave a make it your own prompt for our first paper. When I went in for my feedback session she immediately told me I had to rewrite my paper without giving much reason other than that it was not rooted in the book. So that led me to reading an extra book (over fall break), coming up with several more theses (all of which she said “sounded too much like research papers”) and finally writing a 15-page personal essay in addition to keeping up with the other readings and essays for the class. In what was an extremely personal piece, her feedback was insensitive and…

Both Professor Spiegel and her British Lit class are difficult to describe, but I'll try: The syllabus, which consists of several films as well as novels, is a great one. It's hard not to like most of the works, and even if you hate one of them, it's easy to vent--in class, on CourseWorks, maybe even in a paper. Professor Spiegel lectures with a rather quiet voice, laughs all the time about stuff that most people don't find funny, and does absolutely nothing that will help or hurt your final grade. She has absolutely nothing to do with it. You write two papers--one 5-7 page one halfway through the semester, one 10-12 page final due at the end. For both, you can choose just one book OR movie to write about, so... You can NEVER come to lecture, NOT READ anything, NOT WATCH any of the films except for two, write your first paper about one movie, write your final about the second movie, turn them in, and get anywhere from a C- to an A for your final grade. Maybe the weekly CourseWorks posts (basically responses of 3-5 sentences on the works for the week) matter, but I doubt it. Even if they do, they take 5 minutes each, whether you know what you're talking about or not. The quality is not judged. Professor Spiegel doesn't read the papers, either. Her TA does, so if you have a generous one, you're good. If he/she is harsh, you're probably screwed. You should base your decision on w…

Intro to American Studies is an AMAZING, eye-opening course that everyone should take! The goal is to broadly address different themes of the American experience, combining history, politics, literature, and film. It really gives you new perpsectives on American life, and you learn to analyze elements of culture in new ways. The class has about 40 people, but it runs like a seminar, and the profs are always asking for discussion (though often it stayed silent). Weekly discussion sections are very helpful and thought-provoking, and the TAs are extremely qualified and wonderful. Both professors are amazing and very friendly, especially Delbanco, whose lectures and questions are very profound and stimulating (he's also a very established scholar of American history/literature). The reading is very heavy, but you really should do as much as you can. Your only grades are two big papers based on a topic of your choice, so you can definitely skip readings and get away with it, but you'll be lost in class and get much less out of the course.

It's completely understandable why Spiegel gets a wide spectrum of reviews. She is a very smart woman, and cares greatly about both literature and her students, but her teaching style can be frustrating. While her classes are billed as lectures, she attempts to conduct them like seminars, which generally results in the same talkative people (often auditors) making inane and arbitrary comments. To Spiegel's credit, she can generally work these comments into her larger scheme for the class, and isn't hesitant to tell you when she disagrees with you. Her "lectures" are pretty disorganized, but this seems a product of her syllabi. The books she chooses are fantastic, and are not canonical works with years of previous scholarship, so she seems genuinely to be grappling with the texts, and expects her students to do the same. She is kind of spacey - for Brit Lit, we didn't receive our first papers back until a few weeks before the next paper was due, and didn't receieve our final grades until the next semester - but she is a fair grader and is eager to meet with you about the class or your papers. She is also open to rewrites, which can be key in a two paper course.

I loved this class! The people who are so upset about Prof. Spiegel are clearly the uptight types who base their entire identities on the grades the've learned to count on and predictable teaching styles and standards. If you open your mind to her and what she is saying, you will see that even her most off the cuff joke is loaded with insight and perception about how the film or reading actually APPLIES to the world. Yeah, she takes a really long time to grade, but responds to papers more thoughtfully and has higher expectations for her students' own thoughtfulness than any other professor I've had. I honestly believe that the people who get her have to be far smarter and more fun than the ones who can't see through a little scatteredness. Who cares about your dumb grade anyway? Are you here to learn or rack up points?

This class was so disappointing! It started off great, then spiraled downhill so fast into another lame Barnard English class that you were left wondering what happened to the funny, good lecturer she was on the first day. Maura Spiegel is a whack job. She's disorganized (completely!) and doesn't know how to run a class efficiently. I was left listening to the same stupid girls over and over saying how this part reminded them of when their grandmother died and then they read Moby Dick. Avoid Spiegel at any cost, it's a waste of your time and tuition money since you won't get a thing out of it.

Prof. Spiegel can seem a little spacey but all in all I thought the class was worth it. She picked a decent selection of literature, and if you're worried that "British" works are going to be all staid and stodgy then you're in for a surprise - we read covered the decline of empire and the traditional British society, sex and violence, race relations, all that. We had to see just as many movies outside of class as there were books (something I didn't expect), and that was a real crapshoot - some of the films were brilliant, others were unrelated to the books and utter wastes of time where I thought I'd run out of the room screaming. That being said, you could probably get by in this class only reading a couple of the books so long as you see some films. In such a huge class there was a tendency for just a few people to dominate conversation. This is one of the easier English classes, and people knew it. Anglophiles like myself will pleased. On top of this, Maura is a genuinely nice person who will talk with you at length about any topic in British literature. She certainly knows her stuff, and I enjoyed her lecturing style - it kept me awake, which is something I can't say about all my professors. HOWEVER, A MAJOR POINT: It is now June 11, I handed in my final papers a month ago, and I have yet to see a grade. This bothers me, and I'm sure it's bothering the graduated seniors…

This is the only review I've ever done on CULPA, and I'm writing it to spare others the aggravation of taking a class with this professor. She is not professor material--certainly not Barnard/Columbia material, and probably not even high school material. Her "lectures" were the worst I've experienced in my 3 years of college, and her ability to foment interesting discussion was virtually non-existent. Furthermore, she took weeks to correct our midterms, and as of June 7th I've heard neither hide nor hare about our second papers (due mid/late April), final exams (early May), or final grades. Previous CULPA reviews warned me about her, but I ignored them; BIG MISTAKE. My intellectual development would have been much better served spending 3 credit hours per week huffing solvents instead of diligently attending her classes. They are a total waste of your money and time. The good news is that, like the large portion of the class that did so, you can safely skip every last one of her lectures and probably still do very well. But if you want to learn anything whatsoever, look elsewhere. My advice: if you see a class she's teaching that looks interesting, buy the books on the reading list (if she bothers to make one up). then don't take the class.

before i begin, i should implicate myself as partly responsible for the terrible experience that was this class. if nothing else, i realized that victorian literature is not what i like. nineteenth-century in france and russia = yay. nineteenth-century in england = literary msg. thus the tedium of reading thousands of pages of moralistic conceit only compounded the general drudgery. i don't know what exactly it was--spiegel is plainly brilliant, and really cool--i swear she even quoted devo once--but yeah anyway it was not good. she doesn't lecture. nothing was ever put into context, and when she did lecture whatever relevancy she could lend to my own understanding was undermined by the disproportionate amount of class time spent listening to inane comments by fellow classmates. it was all just so horribly vague and dull. i think it might have actually even been possible for me to enjoy this class were it more structured. but alas it was not, and thus, it sucked.