Chair's Corner

“Learning that Lasts a Lifetime”

The Fall semester has gotten off to an exciting beginning.  Despite the H1N1 specter all our classes are meeting.  Just as some of our students are reading for the first time of the Canterbury pilgrimage, each of us has begun a pilgrimage through a set of readings and written assignments that will change and enlarge our minds and sensibilities.  Walking across campus in brilliant sunshine, among the hum and buzz of students, one can’t help feeling glad—as I did this week--for the privilege of spending an hour or so talking with class members about T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock character (“Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table”).  What despair! But what music! My colleagues feel similar excitement about their subjects, and the new faces they are getting to know.

There is much to report.  Professor Cecelia Ford, our friend and colleague in the English Language and Linguistics wing of the Department, is co-Prinicipal Investigator for an National Institutes of Health grant, an interdisciplinary project that will fund faculty and grad students across the university (in English, Psychology, Business, and Medicine. The NIH reviewers were particularly impressed with Ford’s part of the proposal: using conversation analysis to evaluate verbal and non-verbal interaction in bias literacy workshops.

Professor Susan Stanford Friedman was also notified that she has been awarded the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Susan will receive the award at the International Narrative Conference in April, 2010.  This is the third Booth award (the first went to Booth, and the second to Gerard Genette). as the Wayne Book recipient of the International Society for the Study of Narrative

Just this past week, the Dean of Letters & Science gave us permission to search for new faculty members in modern and contemporary British literature, and in Composition & Rhetoric.  Those searches are under way. The Chancellor’s Madison Initiative has provided the likelihood that many units in L&S will recover some of the losses in faculty and staff that occurred since 2003.  This initiative, however, is meant to encourage innovation in undergraduate education.  As one of the innovations English is developing, we are discussing further ways that our students can get international experience while earning their majors in English.  We want to provide our students with learning that lasts a lifetime.  More on this in another “Chair’s Corner.”