News of the University of Washington Department of English

It is common knowledge that state support for the University of Washington has dropped steadily over the last twenty years – now down to a mere 14% of operating costs – and that an educational crisis is in the works, particularly in the Humanities, and particularly in English. As detailed in the May 17 issue of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the English department is losing faculty, its core strengths in danger. Still, it is not too late. Our department, like others in the University, must now call on its alumni and friends to make a difference. Our needs have never been greater, and we cannot maintain our excellence without your involvement of time, talent, and financial support. 

Your gifts, large and small, make an enormous difference. For example, only a few $35 donations can underwrite a graduate student/faculty colloquium; $100 pays the honorarium for a guest lecturer; $500 enables a graduate student or faculty member to present a paper at a distant conference; $1000 brings a major scholar to Seattle for a lecture, reading, or seminar.  We invite you to renew your support of the English Department, which you can now do on-line by visiting our development website.  We hope that you will do so. Your generosity is deeply appreciated.
 

I think of myself as new chair, even though my actual chair is the one I have used as a faculty person for the past five years and even though I have served two previous terms as chair. But most of all, I find myself committed to the “new” which appears in nearly every column of this newsletter describing the opportunities and challenges we face. I have a few thoughts about the opportunities and about the real challenge of how best to recognize and benefit from them. 

From my reading of much recent UW creative and scholarly work that is listed here, our most challenging opportunity is to sustain and utilize its excellence. Marshall Brown, in “Rethinking the Scale of Literary History,” says that “literature is a chronicle of successive eternities.” Such a view contextualizes the most positive connotations of “new” in the way Keats did when mentioning the Grecian Urn’s “happy melodist, unweared, / For ever piping songs, for ever new.” It is our faculty’s ongoing new work in the pages written, students taught, and many professional and public services rendered that we most cherish and must sustain. The growing number of endowments and of annual contributions for faculty, program, and student support are vitally important, and the new Nancy K. Ketcham endowment could not be more timely.

Through new efforts to increase both public programs and communication, we are acknowledging and demonstrating the impact of alumni and friends generosity. If you are living close enough to attend the twice-quarterly English Forums that begin this fall, please join us. Wherever you are, become electronically present through the new alumni news section of our web page.  However recent your undergraduate education, we are interested in how well it has served you and in what it might have included to meet your needs while here and since. This year we are reconsidering the undergraduate major. Intellectually and pedagogically, this is an essential calibration of curriculum with the expertise and interests of faculty. Because we are well past the decades-old question of what, besides teach, one can do with an English major, our programs must serve the many career options that our graduates have found. Here, your advice can be very useful, and I urge you to provide it as soon as possible (email our undergraduate program director, Professor Caroline Simpson (csimpson@u.washington.edu).
 
 

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Following the recommendations of the English Department Chair Search Committee, Dean David C. Hodge and Divisional Dean Michael Halleran of the College of Arts and Sciences announced a national search for a new chair.

In his letter to the department authorizing the search, Hodge notes that “Searches for external chairs can be problematic, of course, and there are faculty in the department who could serve well in the role of chair. However, a chair resulting from a national search will bring new energy, vision, and perspective at a critical time for the department. We want the English Department to be a robust center of scholarship and teaching, central to the humanities and to the broader range of disciplines within the College of Arts and Sciences.”
Professor Richard Dunn has agreed to serve as chair for at least one year while the search is being conducted. As former chair of English from 1982-1992, Professor Dunn brings a great deal of experience and good judgment to the position. These will be crucial in the coming years, as the department faces issues raised by the departmental strategic plan, by the chair search committee report, and by the self study and exit interview from the ten-year program review.

The search committee appointed by Dean Hodge includes Diana Behler (committee chair) from Germanics, Carolyn Allen and Anis Bawarshi from the Department of English, Galya Diment from the Slavic Department, and John Keeler from Political Science.

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People often say that administrative jobs are thankless positions.  I’ve been fortunate to have not only served as chair of the Department of English for five years from July 1997 to July 2002, but also fortunate to hear the thanks and gratitude of many of my colleagues, students, alumni, and friends of the department. It’s now my turn to say thanks to all who helped me through my five-year term.

Some people think we live and work in an ivory tower, immune to the pressures of the so-called “real world.” I’ve found it’s impossible to separate my work from real life.  I took on the job of chair at a difficult time in my life. Just after accepting the position, my wife, Vicki, passed away after a four-year battle with cancer. Former Dean of Arts and Sciences, John Simpson, offered whatever support I needed. I am grateful to him for his faith in me and I am grateful to Professors Malcolm Griffith and David McCracken for taking on extra administrative work in the first few months of my term as chair.  Current Dean, David Hodge, and Divisional Dean Michael Halleran continued that marvelous support and faith throughout my term.

I’m not a person who delegates work easily, but in that first year I came to rely on the department staff, department program directors, and faculty to do their jobs as well as help me do mine. There are, of course, too many people to thank individually in this limited space. Let me just say I approached our various programs and offices with questions and problems and I received prompt solutions, facts, numbers, charts, and options. The staff in the main department office and our advising office worked beyond the call of duty during and after a strike by UW teaching assistants.

I was fortunate to inherit, from our former chair, Tom Lockwood, an energetic and hard-working staff. I was told by other department chairs that our department administrator, Susan Williams, was the best administrator at the UW. That statement was proven true when Susan crunched numbers and massaged budgets as if she were the fiscal version of Seigfried and Roy, while I spent money like the Department of Defense.
Through my five-year term, my assistant, Cheryl Mathisen, was the very definition of loyalty and hard work. She managed too many faculty searches and thousands of job applications without a single mistake. She handled the confused and unpredictable schedule of department chair with too many meetings, too many memos to write, and too many crises.

Faculty, staff, and students made it easy for me to come to work everyday for the last five years. Professor Richard Dunn taking over as chair made it easy for me to leave the job. I’m beginning a year-long sabbatical leave (and my 30th year of teaching), during which I hope to complete a new novel and complete work on the film version of my previous novel. Following my sabbatical years, I’m scheduled to teach UW courses in Rome and London, teach at the University of Tuebingen in Germany as part of a faculty exchange, and teach at the University of Lyon in France. Sounds like the ivory tower? Hardly, but there is a happy ending. Two years ago I remarried, and my wife Erin and I are expecting a baby—the first for both of us—just after the beginning of the autumn quarter. I think changing diapers might be the very definition of the non-ivory tower real world. And, …talk about a thankless job! 

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We are delighted to announce that English Department alumnae Nancy K. Ketcham (BA 1974) has responded to the rising public awareness of the financial challenges our program faces as a result of declines in state support (see “Strapped UW Losing English Professors,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, May 17, 2002). Nancy (Nan to her many friends) has pledged $250,000 to the department to endow the Nancy K. Ketcham Professorship in English. Funds from this endowment will augment professorial pay, research and publishing resources, and other basic needs that have gone increasingly unmet in recent years.

“With over 55 faculty in the department, this establishes our fourth endowed professorship,” notes Dick Dunn, department chair. “It is an extremely generous, far-sighted gift that makes another step toward our hoped-for future in which we can retain our best faculty talent here, for generations of students to come. We are all so grateful to Nan for making this outstanding gift.”

“I just love the department,” says Nan, a life-long resident of Seattle as well as a continuing student at the University.  “After we raised our family, I’ve been able to return to take more of the department’s courses through the Access Program. I’ve done this for many years, and it has returned the joy of my days as a fulltime student. I am so pleased that I can make this gift, for we do need to make certain this department remains one of the very best, whatever its challenges may be.

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The annual UW Career Week event was selected as an Outstanding Institutional Advising Program Winner by the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA). This quality advising program was chosen as one of 5 programs to be honored with this award in nationwide competition. Two English Department advisers, Melissa Wensel and Kimberly Swayze, serve as members of the steering committee, co-chaired by Susan Templeton (Center for Career Services) and Don Gallagher (UW Alumni Association). Melissa has been involved with the planning of this university-wide event for the past three years and worked since 1992 on the event’s more modest predecessor, the Liberal Arts Career Seminar series; Kimberly joined the planning team in 2001.

UW Career Week is designed to help students and young alumni answer that perennial question: “What am I going to do with my major?” Career Week provides over 50 free panels, workshops, and presentations on specific fields and career development topics; the centerpiece Husky Career Lunch; and a keynote address by a prominent role model from the academic or business community.  Nearly 3,000 students participated in Career Week 2002, learning to make more meaningful connections between their undergraduate educations and the lives they will lead after graduation. Drawing on the talents of academic advisers from over 50 academic programs, career counselors, and alumni relations professionals, Career Week is a model of campus-wide collaboration. 

Careerists at work!  National Award winning Career Week steering committee, including the English Department's Melissa Wensel (top, 5th from right) and Kimberly Swayze (front, left).

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Gillian Harkins has a BA from Wellesley College and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley this year. Her dissertation, “Legal Fantasies:  Regulating the real in Contemporary U.S. Narratives of Incest,” was directed by Judith Butler and Saidiya Hartman. Her teaching interests include modern and contemporary American literature, female novelists, autobiography, trauma, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, feminist and queer theory, and citizenship.

• Marshall Brown, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Research Fellowship.

• Charles Johnson, Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• Heather McHugh, Wellesley College Poetry Prize and Griffin International Poetry Prize.

• Elizabeth Simmons-O’Neill, and Peter Buckroyd, London Program, 2002 Department of English Distinguished Undergraduate Teacher Award.

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• Edward Alexander, editor, J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, Transaction Books, 2001.

• Carolyn Allen and Judith Howard, editors, Feminisms at a Millennium, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

• Linda Bierds, The Seconds, Putman’s, 2001.

• Herbert Blau, The Dubious Spectacle:  Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000, University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

• Wayne Burns, The Flesh and the Spirit in Seven Hardy Novels, Blue Daylight Books, 2002.

• John Coldewey and William Streitberger, editors, Drama, Classical to Contemporary, Prentice Hall (revised edition), 2001.

• Monika Kaup and Debra J. Rosenthal, editors, Mixing Race, Mixing Culture, University of Texas Press, 2002. 

• William H. Matchett, Shakespeare and Forgiveness, Fithian Press, 2002.

• David Shields, Enough About You:  Adventures in Autobiography, Simon and Schuster, 2002

• Sandra Silberstein, War of Words:  Language, Politics and 9/11, Routledge, 2002.

• Robert Stevick, “Hrothgar,” (Sound Recording) in Beowulf:  A Dramatic Reading in the Original Language, The Chaucer Studio, Occasional Readings 27 (3 CDs). 

• Gail Stygall and Ellen Barton, editors, Discourse Studies in Composition, Hampton Press, 2002.

• David Wagoner, The House of Song, University of Illinois Press, 2002.

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• Helane Denise Adams, “’Powers From the Deep’: Ethnic Cultural Memory and Wholeness Theory in Fiction by African American and Chicana Women” (Johnnella Butler) 

• Steven Wade Browning, “Webwriting 281: Coding, Compromise and Considerations in Teaching Writing for the World Wide Web” (George Dillon) 

• Michael Filas, “Cyborg Subjectivity” (Malcolm Griffith)

• Charles H. Fischer, “Producing the Politics of the Parodic: The (Porno) Graphing of the Bourgeois Body” (Gary Handwerk)

• Joshua Fisher, “Misreading and the Parameters of Exemplarity in Early Modern England” (Barbara Fuchs and Sara van den Berg)

• Conseula Alena Francis,  “(Re)Making a Difference: Theorizing Experience and Racial Individuality in Twentieth Century African American Literature and Literary Theory” (Johnnella Butler) 

• Jeffrey Nevin Hipolito, “Extremes Meet: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Prose of S.T. Coleridge” (Raimonda Modiano)

• Aniko Imre, “Allegories of Transition: Feminism and Postcolonial East European Cinemas” (Susan Jeffords and Ranjana Khanna) 

• Gail Ann Kluepfel, “Reading Textual Differences: Grammars, Epistemologies, and their Subjects in Composition” (George Dillon)

• Jodi M.E. Lundgren, “Narrative Aesthetics, Multicultural Politics, and (Trans)National Subjects: Contemporary Fictions of Canada” (Carolyn Allen)

• Alison Marie Mandaville, “Spelling Violation: Writing Bodies From the Margins” (Malcolm Griffith) 

• Deborah Miranda, “’In My Subversive Country’:  Searching for American Indian Women’s Love Poetry and Erotics” (Juan Guerra)

• Tedra Osell, “The Ghost Writer:  English Essay Periodicals and the Materialization of the Public in the Eighteenth Century” (Marshall Brown)

• Anne Raine, “A Thing Wide Open:  Nature, Modernity, and American Women Writers” (Jessica Burstein and Priscilla Wald)

• Margaret Roland, “Material Malory:  The Roman War Account in the Caxton and Winchester Documents and a Parallel-Text Edition” (Paul Remley)

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“That was one of the best department functions I’ve attended.”  “Great celebration.”  “What a party, man!”  These are only a sampling of the appreciative comments overheard in the hallways of Padelford the day after the graduation celebration for the 2002 MFAs in creative writing. The ceremony and reception held on June 6 was organized by creative writing students with funds from the James T. Lee Endowment.

Celebration highlights included a rousing version of “Pomp and Circumstance” on the pipe organ in the Walker-Ames room of Kane Hall to set the stage for readings by each of the graduates.  Shawn Wong, department chair, and Maya Sonnenberg, director of creative writing, were the hosts for the evening.  Their duties included anointing each graduate with Mardi Gras beads and a graduation tassel.  Each student gave a 4-minute reading.  Creative writing faculty and staff were recognized with grateful acknowledgements submitted by the graduates.  Family members and friends were thanked for both their emotional and financial support, and everyone enjoyed champagne, good food, and camaraderie.

Graduating with an MFA in fiction were Shelly Meyring, Larissa Min, Daniel Smith, and Marcia Woodard.  Graduating with an MFA in poetry were John Crosby, Marika Francisco, Krista Halverson, Julie Larios, Tarisa A.M. Matsumoto-Maxfield, Rebecca Mitchell, Sierra Nelson, and Cassie Sparkman.

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• Kathleen Alcala (MA 1985), David Guterson (BA 1978, MA 1982), and Priscilla Long (MFA 1990) will begin a series of classes for writers this fall for Field’s End, a Bainbridge Island writers organization. The class series is affiliated with the Bainbridge Public Library.  Winter courses will be taught by Long, Michael Byers, Carole Glickfeld, and Nick O’Connell (MA 1985, PhD 1996).

• Helane Adams (PhD 2002) accepted an Assistant Professorship at Miami University, Middletown Campus.

• Kristin Anderson (BA 2002) received the Western Regional Honors Conference Award in poetry.  This fall she begins an English teaching assistantship at two Austrian high schools sponsored by the Fulbright Commission.

• Toni La Ree Bennett (PhD 1993) has recently started an online literary/fine art journal named Branches (www.branchesquarterly.com).

• Janet Ellerby (PHD 1989) is the author of Intimate Reading:  The Contemporary Women’s Memoir (Syracuse 2001). She is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

• Roger B. Fanning’s (BA 1985) new book of poetry, Homesick, was published by Penguin 2002.

• Lydia Fisher (PhD 2001) has accepted a three-year appointment at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Christy Flores (PhD 2002) joins the faculty at Fullerton College, California.

• Conseula Francis (PhD 2002) has accepted a tenure-track position at The College of Charleston.

• Tammy L. Greenwood (MFA 1996) has written a new novel, Undressing the Moon, St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

• Elaine Tuttle Hansen (PhD 1975) is the new President of Bates College in Maine.

• David Hennessee (PhD 2001) is a Lecturer at California Polytechnic State University.

• Duane Kelly (BA 1974), founder of Pacific Fishing Magazine and chairman of Salmon Bay Expositions, had his first full-length play, Rousseau Hobbes, selected for two readings this past year—at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York and at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska.

• Jing Liu (PhD 2001) will begin teaching at Ocean University of Quingdao this Fall.

• Patrick McEvoy (BA 2002) won eight of the eleven possible awards at the fourth annual ASUW Student Film Festival.

• David McKay (BA 1984), English teacher at Aberdeen High School, was named “Washington State Teacher of the Year.”

• Kirby Olson (PhD 1994), Assistant Professor at SUNY-Delhi, has written a new book, Gregory Corso:  Doubting Thomist, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

• Arlene Plevin (PhD 2001) is a Fulbright Professor at Tampkang University (Taiwan).

• Dana Ringuette (PHD 1987) is Chair of the English Department at Eastern Illinois University.

• Therese Saliba (MFA 1989, PhD 1993) co-edited, with Carolyn Allen and Judith Howard, Gender, Politics and Islam, University of Chicago Press, 2002.

• Sandi Sonnenfeld (MFA 1989) published her first book, This is How I Speak: The Diary of a Young Woman, Impassio Press, LLC, 2002.

• Daniel Smith (MFA 2002) has been named one of the fiction winners in the national Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Intro Journals Project.

• David Snyder (BA 2002) has accepted a job as Producer for Rewind, the weekend news and comedy show on National Public Radio.

• Melvin Sterne (BA 2001) is Senior Editor and publisher of Carve Magazine, (www.carvezine.com) one of the world’s most popular web-based fiction magazines, read by more than 4,000 readers per month in 40 different countries.

• Johanna Stoberock (MFA 1998) has sold her first novel to Norton. City of Ghosts should be on the shelves in March 2003.

• Richard Tracey (BA 1972, PhD 1989), Vice President of Product Development for Bridges Learning, writes a monthly column for “Union Jack,” America’s only national British newspaper.

• Emily Warn (MA 1982), Acting Publisher of Copper Canyon Press and author of two books of poetry, The Leaf Path and The Novice Insomniac, presented a nature poetry workshop this fall at Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.

• Robyn Wiegman (PhD 1988) is Director of Women Studies at Duke University.

• Jennifer Wyatt (MA 1977, PhD 1985) and Laura Kastner (clinical professor of Psychiatry at the UW) have written The Launching Years:  Strategies for Parenting from Senior Year to College Life, Three Rivers Press, 2002. 

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