talk about our reading at meal times ...". Teaching career Oates taught in Beaumont, Texas, for a year, then moved to Detroit in 1962, where she began teaching at the University of Detroit. Influenced by the Vietnam war, the 1967 Detroit race riots, and a job offer, Oates moved across the river into Canada in 1968 with her husband, to a teaching position at the University of Windsor in Ontario. In 1978, she moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and began teaching at Princeton University. Among others, Oates influenced Jonathan Safran Foer, who took an introductory writing course with Oates in 1995 as a Princeton undergraduate. Foer recalled later that Oates took an interest in his writing and his "most important of writerly qualities, energy," noting that she was "the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that." Oates served as advisor for Foer's senior thesis, which was an early version of his novel Everything Is Illuminated (published to acclaim in 2002). Oates retired from teaching at Princeton in 2014 and was honored at a retirement party in November of that year. Oates has taught creative short fiction at UC Berkeley since 2016 and offers her course in spring semesters. Views Religion Oates was raised Catholic but as of 2007 is an atheist. In an interview with Commonweal magazine, Oates stated, "I think of religion as a kind of psychological manifestation of deep powers, deep imaginative, mysterious powers which are always with us." Politics Oates self-identifies as a liberal, and supports gun control. She was a vocal critic of former US President Donald Trump and his policies, both in public and on Twitter. Oates opposed the shuttering of cultural institutions on Trump's inauguration day as a protest against the President, stating this "would only hurt artists. Rather, cultural institutions should be sanctuaries for those repelled by the inauguration." In January 2019, Oates stated that "Trump is like a figurehead, but I think what really controls everything is just a few really wealthy families or corporations." Twitter Oates is a regular poster on Twitter with her account given to her by her publisher HarperCollins. She has drawn particular criticism for the purportedly perceived Islamophobia of her tweets. Oates stated in her criticized tweet, "Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is