email:

Go ahead and send me an email. I am generally available, and usually respond in a day or so. Sometimes I take longer, however, so don’t email me about a paper or exam the night before or the morning of, asking for vital information that will change what you will write or study. Generally speaking, if I don't get back to you after 3 or 4 days, send me another email; I forget, emails get dropped into the Junk mail folder, other stuff goes wrong. I won't be annoyed.

Do you want college to prepare you for the work world? Many students say they want this, and yet they often don't treat college like what it is—a profession. Write to me the same way you would your team manager or boss at work. “Dear Rob” is fine, especially once the semester is underway, as is “Dear Professor” or “Dear Professor Rushing.” Everyone who grew up with paper mail (i.e., many of your future employers) will find the lack of an opening greeting weird and offputting, and an abrupt "Hey" will sound rude. (In all seriousness, I hear my colleagues complain about this more than any other thing that students do. And we complain a lot :-)

office hours:

I’m in my office (2122 FLB, on the second floor of FLB, on the north side of the building) every Monday and Tuesday from 11-12. Come prepared with specific questions or ideas—it’s  generally unproductive  when a student arrives and says “I have no ideas don’t know what I want to write about.” It’s okay to come from time to time to just chat, but don’t ‘occupy’ my office hours—other students need to talk, too, and a surprising number of people don’t knock or let me know they’re waiting. If you can't come to my regularly scheduled office hours, just email me so we can come up with an appointment time, or better still, see if I'm available right after class.

Robert Rushing is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature. He works on modern literature and popular culture (especially film and television) in English, Italian and French. He has published on topics from 19th-century Italian lyric poetry and modern Italian literature, to spaghetti Westerns and the television series Dr. Who. His first book, Resisting Arrest is about popular culture and detective fiction; his most recent book, Descended from Hercules (Indiana University Press), is about action films and television that focuses on the muscled male body, from silent classics like Cabiria (1914) to contemporary fare like 300, or Spartacus: Blood and Sand; it won the 2017 Best Film/Media book from the American Association for Italian Studies. He has also co-edited academic books on the television series Mad Men and Orphan Black.