August 28, 2006

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

I write to welcome you back to a new academic year.

We have been fortunate during the past year to have Meghan Mehta serving so competently as “substitute” APO (Assistant Program Officer) while Marilyn Weber was on child-care leave. After much soul-searching, Marilyn has decided not to return, and Meghan has agreed to stay on with us as APO, for which I’m personally most grateful.

Mario DiGangi is back as one of the Program’s two Deputy Executive Officers, heading up Admissions and Financial Aid. Most of our Financial Aid money for the current year has been distributed, but if you have questions or requests – and especially if you’re teaching in CUNY, have been in the program less than five full years, and think you might be eligible for tuition remission – you should be in touch with Mario and me.

Robert Reid-Pharr will be away this year, having been named Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Oregon: we’ll think of him rafting down the Willamette River and drinking espresso in the Zenon Café – and we’ll eagerly anticipate his return.

Ammiel Alcalay has graciously agreed to step in as Deputy EO, in charge of our placement efforts, the scheduling of courses, and the teaching internship program. Having seen Ammiel in action as Chair of his department at Queens College, I know that he’ll be an energetic, efficient, and creative presence as DEO.

Joan Richardson has agreed to serve as the Program’s Student Progress Officer. Should you have questions about your progress in the Program – or should you receive a “satisfactory progress hold” from the Registrar – you should talk with Joan.

In the remainder of this letter, I want to give a quick overview of some of our accomplishments during the past year. I apologize if I’ve missed anything newsworthy (as I undoubtedly have): let me know, and I’ll include additional information in future communications to the Program.

Admissions
This semester, we welcome 53 new students. That’s a significantly larger group than usual (last year’s group was on the small side, so the average over the two years keeps enrollment in the program fairly steady). The Admissions Committee, chaired by Mario DiGangi, reviewed 250 applications (fourteen more than the previous year), and the applicant pool was extraordinarily qualified and interesting. We made the same number of offers of admission as we had made a year earlier, but received a much higher rate of acceptance: I hope that this speaks to the strength of the Program’s reputation out there in the world.

This year’s entering class is extremely impressive. Students’ areas of interest are wide-ranging – including the medieval and early modern; Romanticism and Victorian literature; African American and American studies; modernism, postmodernism, the postcolonial (and much more). About two-thirds of the entering class already have a master’s degree (including several M.F.A.s); this is about the same proportion as in the previous year. Students come to us from all over the country, as well as from Canada, India, the Netherlands, Serbia and Montenegro, and Singapore. About half have the support of a Gilleece, MAGNET, or Chancellor’s fellowship.

On September 8, our first Friday Forum will be an orientation and welcome for new students (at 4 p.m.). All new students have now been assigned faculty and student mentors: the reception following the orientation event should give mentors and mentees an opportunity to meet each other. Please make every effort to attend and welcome our new colleagues.

Student Achievements
Students in the Program continue to teach widely within and beyond the CUNY system; to be awarded GTFs, Writing, and Technology Fellowships; and to win dissertation-year awards and post-doctoral fellowships. Winning Graduate Center-wide dissertation fellowships for 2006-7 were Alina Gharabegian, Caroline Hellman, Brenda Henry-Offor, Jean Mills, Jennie Rosenfeld, Tyler Schmidt, and Danny Sexton. The recipients of the English Program’s dissertation-year fellowships were Christa Baiada, Una Chung, Helen Davis, Katharine Jager, Christopher Leslie, LaRose Parris, Jody Rosen, and Matthew Williams.

Twenty-nine students completed the Ph.D. in English last year, and they produced dissertations of an extremely high quality. I present a full list here, noting dissertations that won prizes from the Program:

Ben Alexander, “Yaddo: A Creative History”

Stephen R. Armstrong II, “Persistent Optimism and Recurrent Skepticism: Herbert Spencer and the United States”

Sara E. Atwood, “‘A Cowslip from an Oxlip and a Blackthorn from a White’: Ruskin’s Educational Philosophy and Fors Clavigera”

Mary D. Been, “Unfamilial Bonds: Technological Fiction and the Reimagination of Gender”

Jamie Skye Bianco, “New Media and Technoscience Fictions: Affect, Speed, and Control” (Irving Howe Prize in Politics and Literature)

B. McEvoy  Campbell, “An Opera in Aid of the Reading of History”

Jeffrey Couchman, “The Devil and Miz Cooper: The Night of the Hunter on Page and Screen” (Robert Adams Day Prize in Interdisciplinary Work)

Christine M. Daley, “Urban Fervor: Los Angeles Literature and Alternative Religion”

Richard Vincent Dragan, “Aesthetic Science and the Encyclopedic Novels of Joyce, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Powers”

Maria Fahey, “Unchaste Signification: Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama” (Lloyd Davis Prize in Early Modern Studies and Faculty/Alumni Prize for Most Distinguished Dissertation)

Eric Falci, “‘A Valley of the Broken Alphabet’: Gaps and Fractures in Contemporary Irish Poetry” (Timothy Healy Prize in Twentieth-Century Poetry and Poetics and Faculty/Alumni Prize for Most Distinguished Dissertation)

Margaret Chase George, “Self-Possessed Subjects: Property, Identity, and the Love-Letter in British Women’s Fiction, 1781–1853” (Adrienne Auslander Munich Prize in Feminist Studies)

Jonathan W. Gray, “Innocence by Association: Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination” (Melvin Dixon Prize in African American Studies)

James C. Hatch, “Refiguring the Fall: Shame and Intertextuality in Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Keats” (Calder Prize in Romanticism)

Rolando Leodore Jorif, “The Slave Narrative’s Use of Agape and Herman Melville’s Billy Budd”

Andrea Knutson, “American Spaces of Conversion: The Conductive Imaginaries of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James” (Alfred Kazin Prize in American Literature and Culture)

Sharon Lattig, “Acts of the Mind: The Nature of Lyric Experience”

Ian Hugh Marshall, “Rhetorics of Whiteness: Race, Class, and the Development of Early American Modernism”

Tim McCormack, “Literacyscape: The History, Politics, and Practice of Basic Writing” (Calder Prize in Composition Studies)

Margaret M. McDermott, “‘Of All That Ever Anywhere Wherever Was’: The All-Inclusive Joycean Memory in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake”

Michael Niemczyk, “The Poetical Life of Insects: A Meditation on the Miniature and Modernity”

Sean O’Toole, “Technologies of the Self: Habit and the Victorian Novel” (Paul Monette Prize in Gay and Lesbian Studies)

Tanya Radford, “Visible Effects: Narrative Spectacle and Affective Response in the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel”

Cathleen J. Rowley, “Women’s Rights and Women’s Work: Politics and Professionalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction” (Adrienne Auslander Munich Prize in Feminist Studies)

David Tenenbaum, “Rethinking Remorse: Guilt, Shame, and Modern Identity”

Christine Timm, “Breaking the Silence: Manifestations of the Oral Tradition in Twentieth-Century Anglophone Literature”

Elizabeth Toohey, “Bodies and Beliefs: Religious Identity in Contemporary American Women’s Narratives”

Aimeric Vacher, “The Linguistic and Literary Impact of the Norman Invasion of England: Royal Legal and Juridical Writings from 1066 to 1189”

Krystyna Zamorska, “Ethnic Fictions: Cultural Mediations in Contemporary American Writing” (Irving Howe Prize in Politics and Literature)

Many of our students during the past year traveled to national and international conferences – the MLA, the ASA, the Dickens Universe, Kalamazoo, etc. – to present their work. Students are also publishing widely, including (for instance) Jenny Boully’s new book, [one love affair]* , Douglas A. Martin’s They Change the Subject and Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother, and a special issue of Women and Performance, coedited by Robert Diaz. (Apologies to all those I’m not mentioning, and please don’t hesitate to let me know when you’re presenting papers, publishing articles, etc.)

Website
A hard-working committee, co-chaired by Helen Davis and Chris Leslie, and including Talia Schaffer, Meghan Mehta, Lily Saint, Jason Schneiderman, and (our new member) Lizzie Harris, has worked during the past year to reconceive the English Program Website. We spent a day this summer transferring most of our Web content to a new format, and we hope, soon, to be able to unveil the new site. This will include a password protected area where we plan to make available examples of comprehensive exams, orals lists, prospectuses, and dissertation chapters.

The Website will also now host Jeff Drouin’s Ecclesiastical Proust Archive.

New Professional Development/Program Requirements Series
As part of the Friday Forum this year, we will institute a new series of events, addressed to questions of professional development like publishing and to the nuts-and-bolts of progress through the Ph.D. Program. In addition to our annual Job Forum (2 p.m., September 29), we will have workshops on writing and submitting the dissertation prospectus (2 p.m., October 6); presenting papers at conferences (2 p.m., October 27); preparing for the oral examination (2 p.m., November 3); and academic publishing (2 p.m., November 17).

In addition, October 13 will be Area Group and Field Day, on which area groups will gather to discuss the state of the discipline, curricular issues, and faculty needs.

Job Placement
Robert Reid-Pharr and a dedicated faculty committee headed up the Program’s job placement effort last year. That included, for the second time, a suite at the MLA convention in Washington, D.C., ably run by Rebekah Sheldon and Carrie Shanafelt, where job seekers could gather for advice, conversation, and relaxation.

Many of our students and recent alumni had MLA and post-MLA interviews, and many were offered full-time and tenure-track positions. Recent (2005 and 2006) graduates of the Ph.D. Program in English found full-time, tenure-track jobs beginning Fall 2005 or 2006 at the following institutions:

• Adelphi University
• California Institute of the Arts
• The Citadel
• Eastern Kentucky University
• Elms College (Chicopee, Mass.)
• Hofstra University
• John Jay College, CUNY
• Kingsborough Community College, CUNY
• Kyung Hee University at Seoul (Korea)
• Millersville College (Pennsylvania)
• New York City College of Technology, CUNY
• Queens College, CUNY
• Queensborough Community College, CUNY
• San Jose State University
• Southern New Hampshire University
• St. John Fisher University (Rochester, NY)
• Syracuse University
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Southern Mississippi
• University of Wisconsin at Stout

In addition, several 2006 graduates had already begun tenure-track work before graduation; they continue in positions at the Oregon Institute of Technology; Principia College; Westchester Community College; and William Paterson University.

2006 graduates also are taking up or continuing full-time, non-tenure track positions at New York University and Princeton University.

In a recent survey of 1999-2000 graduates five years after graduation:

91.3% of the alumni responded to the survey

Of respondents:

85.7% were employed full-time in education

9.5% were employed in the nonprofit sector

4.8% were employed in business/industry

Alumni held tenure-track jobs at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The College of Staten Island, Eastern New Mexico University, Hunter College High School, John Jay College, Kingsborough Community College, Ocean County College, Queens College, Stern College/Yeshiva University, SUNY Old Westbury, University of New Hampshire, Westchester Community College, and West Virginia University. Others held non-tenure track administrative positions at CUNY and Laguardia Community College. Full-time, non-tenure track teaching positions were held at Stern College and New York Law School. Those in the non-profit sector worked at the National Development and Research Institute (NDRI) and the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

Faculty
Two long-time members of the Ph.D. faculty have recently retired, or will retire this year: Norman Kelvin and Donald Stone (Norman has also been on the faculty at CCNY, and Donald at Queens). We wish them the very best as they move on to new projects. Donald will spend the fall semester lecturing in China. And Norman will, we hope, be at many of our Friday Forum events, especially one being organized to honor him on October 27. Louis Menand, who has been on leave for the past three years and teaching at Harvard, has decided to stay at Harvard.

We also welcome two new faculty members to the Ph.D. Program. Suresh Canagarajah of Baruch College joins our faculty in composition/rhetoric. Carrie Hintz joins the faculty in eighteenth-century studies.

We will revisit, during the current year, the question of further faculty appointments. We have not yet made appointments in two fields that we earlier had decided were priorities – postcolonial studies and earlier American/African American women’s writing – and we need to decide how to proceed in these areas. We will also ask all area groups to meet and assess their needs for faculty.

Our distinguished faculty continue to distinguish themselves in a variety of ways. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. David Reynolds’s book, John Brown Abolitionist, has won the Gustavus Myers Book Award for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. Wayne Koestenbaum will advance this year from the rank of Professor to that of Distinguished Professor.

Faculty publications for 2005-2006 include:

Ammiel Alcalay, from the warring factions

Mary Ann Caws, Surrealist Love Poems (edited) and Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology (coedited/translated), Henry James (Overlook Illustrated Lives), and Surprised in Translation

Wayne Koestenbaum, Best Selling Jewish Porn-Films: New Poems

Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe

Jane Marcus, ed., Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (edition, with Introduction, Notes, Bibliography)

Sondra Perl, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Non-Fiction

I’m sure I’ve missed many significant faculty achievements: don’t hesitate to call these to my attention.

Alumni
During 2005-6, alumni continued to be extremely generous supporters of the Ph.D. Program in English. We received over 135 individual gifts, which made possible our funding of dissertation-year fellowships and dissertation prizes. (Students and faculty who participated in our annual Phonathon deserve the hearty thanks of all of us in the Program.) We thank alumni for their continuing interest in the Program, their support for current students, and their willingness to participate in Program events.

In addition, thanks to an anonymous gift, all Phonathon contributions of over $100 received matching funding. And another generous anonymous donation to the Graduate Center has made possible the funding of a book subvention to aid in the publication of  those dissertations that receive the Alumni/Faculty Prize for Most Distinguished Dissertation.

***

I hope all have had good, productive, and relaxing summers. I look forward to seeing you all soon, and I remind you again of the first Friday Forum – the new student welcome/orientation – September 8, 4 p.m., room 4406 (English lounge), with a reception to follow (at about 6 p.m.).

All my best wishes,

Steve Kruger
Executive Officer