September 1, 2005

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

I write to welcome you back from the summer to a new academic year here in the Ph.D. Program in English at the Graduate Center. As you all know, the Program has changed a bit since last semester: we welcome Meghan Mehta as APO (Assistant Program Officer). If you haven’t yet met Meghan, stop by the office (4409) and introduce yourself. Marilyn Weber, who is on child-care leave, sends her best to all. I had the pleasure last week of visiting with Marilyn and meeting Milo, who seems a calm and wise child, as we’d expect of Marilyn’s baby. Milo of course has a standing invitation to all Friday Forum events, and especially the Winter Revels.

Robert Reid-Pharr and Mario DiGangi are back as the Program’s two Deputy Executive Officers. As was the case last year, Robert will be heading up the Placement Committee, the scheduling of courses, and the teaching internship program. Mario is in charge of Admissions and Financial Aid. Because of the post-academic year hike in graduate tuition, imposed by our CUNY Board of Trustees, there are still some uncertainties about the current year’s financial aid allocations. Some additional money may be forthcoming for international students and first-year students paying out-of-state tuition. There also may be some additional money for tuition remission for some of those teaching within the CUNY system. We hope, as soon as possible, to have all the money sorted out. In the meanwhile, if you have questions about financial aid, you should be in touch with Mario and me.

Scott Westrem has agreed to serve as the Program’s Student Progress Officer, a job that David Richter generously took on last year. 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 Scott.

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 31 new students. Last year’s Admissions Committee, chaired by Mario DiGangi, reviewed about 250 applications, and the applicant pool was extraordinarily qualified and interesting. The process of selection was most difficult, and this year’s entering class is extremely impressive. Students’ areas of interest are wide-ranging – including the medieval and early modern; eighteenth-century, 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), and students come to us from all over the country, as well as from Canada and Malaysia. Over two-thirds have some form of fellowship support – a Gilleece, MAGNET, or Chancellor’s fellowship.

On September 9, 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 2005-6 were Jaime Cleland, Eric Falci, Matthew Gold, Keiko Miyajima, Judith Mulcahey, and Jill Toliver. The recipients of the English Program’s dissertation-year fellowships were Jaime Cleland, Francesco Crocco, Melissa Dunn, Sean Egan, Maria Fahey, Andrew Fitch, and Kate Moss.

Almost 30 students completed the Ph.D. in English last year, and they produced dissertations of an extremely high quality. We were able to award prizes to the following dissertations:

• Crystal Benedicks, “Spasmodic Bodies and Victorian Poetics: Biology, Masculinity, and Modernity in Spasmodic Poetry”
• Melissa Ann Bloom, “Unshap’d Monsters: Political Farce on the London Stage, 1717-1737”
• Evan Brier, “Advertisements for Themselves: The 1950s American Novel and the Production of Belief”
• June Elizabeth Dunn, “Troubled Houses: Irish Women Writing the Great War”
• Geoffrey Jacques, “Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary”
• Cara Murray, “Imperial Ways: The Victorians, the Suez Canal, and Narrative”
• Ann M. Peters, “Travelers in Residence: Women Writing New York at Mid-Century”
• Anne P. Rice, “Dangerous Memories: Lynching and the U.S. Literary Imagination”
• Eric L. Tribunella, “Disposable Objects: Contrived Trauma and Melancholic Sacrifice in American Literature for Children and Young Adults”
• David Yaffe, “Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing”
• Jung-Wan Yu, “Postimperial Narrative: Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and Tim O’Brien”

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) books of poetry like Jason Schneiderman’s Sublimation Point and Nick Powers’s Theater of War. (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.)

Job Placement

Robert Reid-Pharr and a dedicated faculty committee headed up the Program’s job placement effort last year. That included, for the first time, a suite at the MLA convention, where job seekers could gather for advice, conversation, and relaxation. We hope to be able to continue funding such a Graduate Center job placement locale at future MLAs.

Many of our students and recent alumni had MLA and post-MLA interviews, and many were offered full-time and tenure-track positions. Following is a list of some of the institutions at which students found full-time employment (and one post-doctoral fellowship):

• California Institute of the Arts
• Elms College (Chicopee, Mass.)
• Hofstra University
• Kyung Hee University at Seoul (Korea)
• Lehman College, CUNY (two-year full-time substitute position)
• Millersville College (Pennsylvania)
• Queens College, CUNY (two placements)
• San Jose State University
• Southeastern Louisiana University (full-time renewable)
• Southern New Hampshire University
• St. John Fisher University (Rochester, NY)
• Syracuse University
• UCLA, Graduate School of Information Sciences (post-doc)
• University of Southern Mississippi
• University of Wisconsin at Stout

The Graduate Center has recently begun surveying all alumni five years after the receipt of their degrees, and this has been a new, and heartening, source of data on job placement.

For 1998-99 graduates:

            68.8% of the alumni responded to the survey

Of respondents:

            81.8% were employed full-time in education

            9.1% were employed in the nonprofit sector

            9.1% reported no employer

Alumni held tenure-track jobs at Kingsborough Community College, Lehman College, Mt. St. Mary College, Nassau Community College, New Jersey City University, New York City College of Technology, Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada), and Rider University. One alumnus held an administrative position at City College.

Results are not yet fully tabulated for 1999-2000 graduates. But of 23 graduates, 17 (73.9%) are employed in higher education, most in tenure-track positions. One alumnus has a high-level administrative job with the American Foundation for AIDS Research; another works full-time at Hunter College High School.

The Program has also recently completed the MLA’s survey of graduate programs, which includes placement data for 2003-4 graduates. Of 25 alumni in this group, 12 (48%) have tenure-track positions. An additional 8 (32%) are working in higher education, though not currently on the tenure track. Two alumni (8%) have post-doctoral fellowships (at the University of Miami and University of Pennsylvania). One is teaching high school, and one is working in the business sector.

All in all, CUNY graduates tend to find full-time employment in higher education, though the higher rate of tenure-track employment among 1998-2000 graduates than among 2003-4 graduates suggests that it may take several years to find a tenure-track position. A significant number of Program alumni also find rewarding careers in the nonprofit and business sectors and in high school teaching.

Faculty

Two long-time members of the Ph.D. faculty have recently retired, or are planning to retire this year: Fred Kaplan and Catherine McKenna (both have also been faculty members at Queens College). We wish them the very best as they move on to new projects, and we congratulate Catherine, who is taking up a professorship in Celtic Studies at Harvard University. Two other faculty members have decided to leave CUNY. David Kazanjian has accepted a position in English at the University of Pennsylvania and Alisa Solomon is moving to Columbia University, to direct the Arts and Culture major in the new M.A. program at the School of Journalism. Again, we wish them both well in these exciting new endeavors.

We also welcome several new faculty members to the Ph.D. Program. Richard Kaye of Hunter College will join our faculty in Victorian and modernist literature. Nancy Yousef of Baruch College and Alan Vardy of Hunter join the faculty in Romanticism. All three have previously taught exciting courses in the Program, and we look forward to their future contributions.

We continue, during the current year, to consider additional appointments to the faculty from within the CUNY system in the following four areas of study: composition/rhetoric, postcolonial, eighteenth-century, and earlier American and African American women’s writing. Two of the Fall Friday Forum events – September 16 and 23 – are faculty membership lectures (in composition/ rhetoric), and we will have additional faculty membership talks later in the year.

Our distinguished faculty continue to distinguish themselves in a variety of ways. Josh Wilner and Chris Suggs have recently taken over as Chairs of their respective English Departments (at City College and John Jay College). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has been named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And, in the last academic year, faculty have published a dizzying variety of work – creative, editorial, scholarly, critical. Following are some recent faculty book publications:

Meena Alexander, Raw Silk (poems) and Indian Love Poems (edited collection)

Mary Ann Caws, To the Boathouse: A Memoir and Surrealism: Themes and Movements

Morris Dickstein, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World

Fred Kaplan, The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography

Wayne Koestenbaum, Model Homes (poems) and Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes (novel)

Sondra Perl, On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate

David Reynolds, John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights

Michael Sargent, Nicholas Love: The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ: A Full Critical Edition

Michele Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture

I’m sure I’ve missed many significant faculty achievements: don’t hesitate to call these to my attention. We will soon be setting up a new display of faculty publications (near the elevators), so make sure that Meghan or I have a copy of your work for display.

Alumni

The English Student Association has organized a new Alumni Relations Committee, which conducted a survey to which a good number of alumni – from the class of 1969 to the class of 2004 – responded. Many alumni indicated an interest in presenting at a Friday Forum or other Program event, and many offered their expertise in advising current students about careers both within and outside academia. Alumni who responded to the survey tell us that they are working in publishing, advertising, high school teaching, and for nonprofit organizations, as well as teaching at a wide variety of colleges and universities – including (in the greater New York area) Borough of Manhattan Community College, Drew University, Long Island University, Mercy College, Nassau Community College, New Jersey Institute of Technology, New York City College of Technology, Queens College, Queensborough Community College, Rider University, St. Francis College, St. John’s University, Westchester Community College, William Paterson University, York College, and (further afield) Central Oregon Community College, Houston Community College, Northern Illinois University, Ohio State University, Seattle University, University of Leeds, University of Missouri – Columbia, and Widener University.

During 2004-5, alumni continued to be extremely generous supporters of the Ph.D. Program in English. We received over 125 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.

***

A long letter, I know. But I think our Program has much to be proud of and celebrate. I hope to see you all soon, and I remind you again of the first Friday Forum – the new student welcome/orientation – September 9, 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

PhD Program in English
The Graduate Center City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 7407 New York, NY 10016-4309
telephone: 212-817-8315 fax: 212-817-1518
email: english@gc.cuny.edu