Letter from the Chair

Dear Friends of the English Department,

If you're receiving this newsletter, you’re more than likely to have studied English at the University of Virginia. I, too, studied English at Virginia, and that’s why I feel all the more strongly about the need for the English Department to reconnect with its former students, partly by means of electronic newsletters such as this one. As an erstwhile English major, I’ll receive this electronic newsletter as soon as it’s sent out, by a later incarnation of myself as department chair. Addressing you, I’m also addressing myself — the student who lived in Dunnington in 1978-79 and thought he was going to major in International Relations, but surprised himself by falling in love with his English classes instead. Most of you have gone on to other pursuits, but in a sense, I’m still an English major at Virginia, twenty-seven years after I declared.

What has changed in that time? Already strong, the English Department became one of the leading literature departments in the world. In the most recent survey by the prestigious National Research Council (1995), the department was ranked 4th in the country out of 127 PhD programs in English, ahead of Duke, Stanford, Cornell, Penn, Chicago, Hopkins, UCLA, Princeton, Brown, Irvine, Michigan, and many other highly regarded institutions. The graduate Creative Writing program, which includes winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, as well as a former U.S. poet laureate, has also been ranked 4th, by U.S. News and World Report. (See poet Greg Orr’s essay for NPR's “This I Believe” series and the article “Poetry in Motion.”) At a time when public universities have suffered dwindling budgets and declining state support, our department can tell a remarkable story of endurance. As the most highly ranked department in Arts & Sciences, English helps propel the University’s overall reputation.

How has our department done it? My hunch is that the faculty’s pluralism has had something to do with this record of success: this is a department that seeks and respects excellence in a wide range of approaches and areas instead of attempting to impose a uniform agenda. The English Department can boast distinguished scholarship and teaching in historical fields from Old English to the Renaissance, the eighteenth century to modern and contemporary literature, as well as in new and emerging areas such as digital humanities, minority literature, and world literature in English.

But our department faces a serious challenge in attempting to retain and advance its reputation — a shortfall in graduate support. Since the National Research Council conducted its rankings, the levels of annual graduate support in the PhD and MFA programs have fallen behind those at peer institutions, with a gap of as much as $8,000 or more per student per year. We recently surveyed competing institutions around the country and documented for the University administration the funding shortfall we face in trying to recruit and retain the best graduate students in the country. Unless we can compete successfully for outstanding graduate students, we will not be able to continue to attract first-rate new faculty or continue to offer a splendid classroom experience for our undergraduates.

That said, because so many people apply for the few slots we have (425 applicants last year for about 16 places in the PhD program), we do admit excellent graduate students each year, students who deserve to receive support comparable to that of their peers at institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Cornell. Among these wonderful graduate students are Robert Stilling, whose discovery of a Robert Frost poem was heralded this fall by NPR, the CBS Evening News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others (see his piece on this amazing discovery), and Richard Gibson, whose engaging reflections on teaching a class on UVa writers are likewise included in this issue. Superb teachers, our graduate students win a disproportionate share of the University’s teaching awards. But as the funding gap continues to widen, it will become ever harder to attract such talented and capable students.

To sustain and advance the standing of the English Department, to lure and keep the best faculty in the country, to provide dynamic discussion sections and classes for undergraduates, we are committed to improving graduate support at Virginia. If you are interested in learning more about what concerned individuals can do to help, please contact Ronica Smucker (), Managing Director of Development in Arts & Sciences.

John O’Brien, my departmental collaborator as associate chair, prepared this first electronic newsletter, with help from our colleagues Alison Booth, interim department chair in the spring, and Christopher Krentz. They have assembled an admirably heterogeneous newsletter that reflects the breadth of our department, including both graduate and undergraduate students, both scholarship and creative writing. As one alumn to another, I thank you for taking the time to sample these pieces and to reflect, I trust, on what it was like to nourish and deepen your love of literature at the University of Virginia.

We’d be delighted to hear from you. Please send news, comments, and suggestions to .

With best wishes for the holiday season,

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