Letter from the Chair

Jahan Ramazani
Photo by Stephen Boykewich

Dear Friends of the English Department,

In times like these, when budgets are scalped and portfolios shredded, you receive SOS distress calls from every institution you’ve ever belonged to. The English Department has suffered deep budget cuts this year and faces yet another round, but fortunately we also have good news to share. Ranked 4^th in 1995 by the National Research Council alongside Harvard and Yale, Stanford and Duke, Columbia and Berkeley, the English Department has fared a little less well in the USNews and World Report rankings, hovering below the top 10 over the last decade. So we were pleased that in the latest USNews survey of PhD programs, released in May, we made it into the top 10 out of nearly 150 English departments, tied with Duke and UCLA at number 10. We’re in good company, just ahead of Brown, Johns Hopkins, and Michigan, and just behind Cornell, Princeton, and Chicago. The English Department was the only department in UVA’s Arts and Sciences to crack the top 10 in these limited rankings, followed by History at 20, Psychology at 23, and Economics at 28. In some subfields, we do even better, such as 18^th-20^th century British literature (6^th) and early American (4^th), and in the previous year’s rankings, the Creative Writing program also ranked 4^th. Given that all the departments that outpaced us have the advantage of greater overall institutional prestige and funding, with Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and other schools ranking in the top 10 as complete universities and UVA at 23, we’re especially glad to have made a dent in the institutional halo effect. Indeed, the halo effect is one of several reasons to believe we’re a stronger department than this reputational survey indicates.

USNews rankings are notoriously imprecise, with little methodological rigor and tiny numerical differences separating the top institutions. Even the National Research Council’s more comprehensive ratings are imperfect: in the forthcoming survey, for example, numbers of publications per faculty member are counted without regard to their impact (in the humanities), and graduate support is more heavily weighted than academic job placement. More important to our future than the rankings has been the department’s success in recruiting outstanding new faculty who are redefining their fields. In my last letter, I announced the arrival of five stellar faculty members in the English Department, spanning a variety of disciplines, including medieval and Renaissance drama (John Parker), the eighteenth century and digital studies (Bradley Pasanak), early American (Jennifer Greeson), Romanticism and digital studies (Andrew Stauffer), and twentieth-century transnational and American studies (Sandhya Shukla). In this letter, I’m thrilled to announce a sixth hire, the appointment in September of a leading scholar of the history of the book and eighteenth-century literature: Michael Suarez, who has held a joint appointment as the J. A. Kavanaugh Professor of English at Fordham University and as Fellow and Tutor in English at Oxford University. As Professor of English and University Professor, Michael Suarez will assume a position as Director of the University’s Rare Book School. He is the co-editor of three major forthcoming works, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 5, 1695-1830, The Oxford Companion to the Book, a million-word reference work, and the eight-volume Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press). He brings to the department and the University the promise of a world-renowned scholar, a stunningly dynamic and demanding teacher, an inventive and passionately engaged citizen.  

Together with first-rate faculty, top-notch graduate students are crucial in making a department’s reputation. Three years ago, when we began this electronic newsletter, I wrote to you about the challenges we’ve been facing to keep our PhD program’s financial packages competitive with peer institutions that are able to offer more lucrative fellowships. We’ve made some tough choices as a department to keep in the game, such as shrinking the size of our entering PhD class to 12, and your support has also been extremely valuable, even if we still have a way to go to match the graduate funding of our peer English departments. I was reminded of how crucial such support is during graduation weekend this year when near contemporaries of mine as English majors at UVA, Robin Millay (’80 BA English) and Roger Millay (’79 BA English), came to see their daughter Kristin, my advisee in her first year at UVA, graduate with honors in English. Roger Millay amazed me when he disclosed that it was reading an earlier chair’s letter of mine in a previous newsletter that inspired him and Robin to establish the wonderful and most welcome Millay Fund, an endowment that provides support for graduate students in English. Writing such letters, you sometimes feel like you’re stuffing notes into bottles and casting them on the electronic high seas. Who knows where they’ll go? Once in a while, as if by magic, such a note sails into just the right hands at just the right time.  

Meeting devoted and generous alumni like the Millays, who are actively helping to sustain and advance the excellence of the English Department, has been one of the great pleasures of chairing the department over the last few years. Another has been working in collaboration with inspiring teachers and pathbreaking scholars, colleagues who build the department’s strengths in established areas, from medieval and Renaissance to American and modernist literature, and in emerging fields, such as global English literature and digital studies. And I’ve been delighted to work with the thoughtful, funny, and creative students in our undergraduate program, which has been thriving and even expanding against the odds, with 582 English majors this past spring, as compared with 501 in 2008, and 463 in 2007. Time and again, despite the financial stringencies, your English Department proves itself to be one of the best teaching and research departments in the world.

While I’ve loved chairing a department in which I was an undergraduate major, some aspects of any such administrative job can also cause queasiness. And so, as if to trade one kind of sea sickness for another, I’m about to embark with my family on a round-the-world shipboard adventure, teaching the literature of countries visited on University of Virginia’s Semester at Sea program, now on its 100^th voyage. As I look forward to setting sail, I’m happy to be leaving the department in the exceptionally capable hands of my successor as chair, a brilliant scholar and superb teacher and dedicated citizen, Cynthia Wall.

Thank you for your continued interest in, and involvement with, the English Department. This sixth issue of the electronic newsletter was prepared by my close administrative collaborator, the department’s excellent and unflappable 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 sincere thanks for your continued support of the English Department,

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