Edgar Rosenberg Leaving To Take Chair at Cornell

Edgar Rosenberg, Briggs-Copeland Assistant Professor of English, will leave Harvard at the end of this year to accept a tenured appointment as associate professor at Cornell.

Rosenberg has been at Harvard for eight years. His course in the history of the novel has been the most popular in the Department for five years outside he required English 70 and English 10. Between 1500 and 2000 Harvard and Radcliffe students have taken Rosenberg's courses. He has taught creative writing English C and upper-level seminars to over 250 aspiring young writers.

The fact that Rosenberg has published at least as much as any of the three assistant professors of English given tenure this year lends a touch of irony to the popular "publish or perish" assumption out appointments. In 1960 he published from Shylock to Svengali," on Jewish stereotypes in English fiction, to excellent views here and in England. Random cause is publishing his study of the historical novel next year.

Rosenberg started to publish fiction as sophomore at Cornell. Since he has distributed stories, criticism, and translations to Commentary, Esquire, and scholarly quarterlies.

The English Department is unable, however, to make as many tenure appointments as it wishes. The number of new appointments the Faculty of Arts and sciences can make each year in the English Department is controlled, as in other departments, by a formula called the Braustein Plan." The plan was adopted most before World War II to provide a pattern for permanent appointments.

The plan froze each department at its historic size" and then calculated how long a professor stays active--an average of 34 years. By dividing the latter figure by the allotted number of places in a department, it is possible to determine how often new appointments may be made.

The appointment of Associate Professors Daniel Seltzer, Larry D. Benson, and Walter Kaiser '54 is likely to have pushed the Department almost up to its size limit. It also approximately balanced the number of professors in the 19th century, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. The 19th century, Rosenberg's field, was already well-populated, although almost entirely with poetry specialists and intellectual historians. Rosenberg's department does leave the department without a tenured member whose field is the 19th-century novel.

At Cornell Rosenberg will teach courses on the 19th century novel, a seminar in fiction for honors candidates, and an introduction to English literature for honors students.

Born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1925, Rosenberg came to the United States at age 14 in 1940 knowing no English. He attended George Washington High School in New York. He went to Cornell on the GI Bill, received his B.A. in 1949 and an M.A. in 1950. Stanford awarded him a Ph.D. in 1958.