Letter from the Chair

Jahan Ramazani
Photo by Stephen Boykewich

Dear Friends of the English Department,

Greetings. This has been a splendid fall for the English Department. Five stellar new faculty members have joined our department, and in the corridors and classrooms of Bryan Hall, you can feel the excitement generated by their presence. The department had offered jobs to its very top candidates in five different fields, and miraculously, they all accepted. This 100% yield reflects in part the continued perception of the department’s strong international standing, as well as the allure of the department’s collegiality and of the Charlottesville area’s beauty, history, and livability. The most important factor in the quality and distinction of a department is its faculty, and we have all been energized by this remarkable new infusion of talent and skill. Despite the grim reality that reduced state budgets have cut into the department’s funding and frozen hiring in the current year, we take heart that, even in these difficult economic times, our new recruits will help build the department’s reputation for excellence.

How will these new hires contribute to the department’s distinction? They are all brilliant scholars, as indicated by their pathbreaking publications and their having won major scholarships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Rome, the Annenberg Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and other learned societies. They are all remarkably capable teachers, having garnered accolades from students and colleagues for their inspiring performance in the classroom. They are all avid departmental citizens and team players, eager to work for the collective good of the department’s vibrant intellectual community.

Together, these new faculty reinforce the exceptional eclecticism of U.Va.’s English Department, since their core interests represent a wide range of historical periods and approaches to understanding them. In the words of a committee report by outside evaluators written before we made these hires, the department—“one of the very best in the country” and clearly deserving of its “high ranking”—has “scholars of national and international reputation in the major areas of literature in English from Old English to contemporary literature and from traditional textual studies to electronic innovations.” If this was true of the department before these hires, it’s even truer now.

One of our new colleagues, John Parker (PhD Penn, 1999), works on literature in English in earlier periods, as a scholar of medieval and Renaissance drama. We were pleased to lure him away from Macalester, where he was teaching after a number of years at Harvard. He is currently doing research in Italy, having won the Rome Prize in Medieval Literature. Another scholar of an early national literature is Jennifer Greeson (PhD Yale, 2001), who had been teaching early American and Southern literature at Princeton, and who is writing a book on how the American South has been imagined in the formation of U.S. national identity. Two of our new hires combine interests in English literature from 1700 to 1900 with innovative work in the digital humanities. Brad Pasanek (PhD Stanford, 2006), a former postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication, analyzes metaphors of the human mind in eighteenth-century British literature, and he does so partly by harnessing the powers of data mining and other computer technologies. Andrew Stauffer (PhD Virginia, 1998), whom we recruited from Boston University, is the author of a book on anger in British Romanticism and has assumed the directorship of U.Va.’s pioneering Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship. The department also joined forces with the American Studies program to make a joint hire in the modern and contemporary field, recruiting Sandhya Shukla (PhD Yale, 1998)—the author of a study of Indian diaspora cultures in postwar America and England—from Columbia University. So there you have it—an amazing range, from the English medieval and Renaissance periods to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British, to postwar global cultures.

Of special significance in building for the department’s future, all five of our new faculty members are within the first dozen years of their careers. As a result, we can expect these new junior and recently tenured faculty members to contribute for many years to the department’s standing as one of the small handful of the very best English departments in the country and indeed the world.

We would not have been able to recruit them without the kind of endowment support that enables us to compete with the best private and public universities. Alumni and friends of the English Department have contributed generously toward making our strong aspirations a reality. In these times of dwindling state resources, such contributions play an ever more vital role in helping us sustain our leadership role in higher education.

More detailed profiles of new faculty members are to be found in this and future issues of our electronic newsletter, alongside other news of the department. Thank you for your continued interest in, and involvement with, the English Department, which gladly sends you this fifth issue of the electronic newsletter, prepared by the Department’s associate chair, John O’Brien. He and I thank you for taking the time to read it. As always, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please send news, comments, and suggestions to .

With best wishes for a delightful holiday season,

Jahan Ramazani
Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English and Department Chair