English Dept. Hires Scholars Of 20th Century

Poaching from Yale, Slate magazine and the department just down the hall, the Department of English has hired three young assistant professors who will beef up their offerings in twentieth century literature.

While Peter C. Nohrnberg ’93 and Leland P. de la Durantaye will be teaching all of their classes in the English Department, John D. Connor ’92 will be a joint appointment with the department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES).

All three professors expect to fill large lecture halls next year due to the widespread interest in twentieth century topics.

De la Durantaye said that the large size of twentieth century classes is a widely acknowledged rule.

“It seems to be the axiom that the closer the subject is to the present day, the higher the enrollments,” de la Durantaye said.

Connor said he had to cap the size of a VES class on contemporary Hollywood cinema he is going to teach, because he was already planning on coping with a large English course.

“One of my classes is going to be lit and film, and I’ve been warned that twentieth century classes are always big, so I’m looking forward to giving some lectures in a big class,” Connor said.

According to Chair of the English Department Lawrence Buell, the appointment in one year of three new assistant professors in a similar field is a rare move.

“If it sounds as if the department is loading up on twentieth century people, and what will we do with them all—they complement each other beautifully,” Buell said. “Each is great on his own terms and each is quite distinctive.”

Connor will be returning to Harvard after spending time working at Slate, the online magazine, as the “fray editor,” moderating the online discussion forum.

He compared the experience to teaching a class.

“Slate has an enormous online forum, lots of people who are really, really smart, really crazy,” Connor said. “It’s like running the world’s largest section about any topic at any time.”

“Part of the reason they hired me is that I’m adequately trained in both film and American literature,” Connor said.

Connor received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.

“There are lots of people who have literature training and taught themselves film, and didn’t do a very good job,” Connor said. “There aren’t that many people the institution has allowed to fully develop both sides of that interest.”

Norhnberg’s said he was looking forward to teaching a class on twentieth Century poetry as well as on his specialty of British Modernism.

“I hope that I’ll be bringing a passion for literary analysis, and also something more general, a sense of literature and its value both to the individual and to broader society,” Nohrnberg said.

De la Durantaye won’t have to move far to take up his new posts: he is currently a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the Humanities in the Literature and Comparative Literature departments.

He said he was looking forward to his move up in the academic world.

“Both inside and outside the University, people will tend to react to you differently if they know you’re a professor and not a post-doctoral fellow in some purgatorial half-station between student and professor,” de la Durantaye said.

All three of the new assistant professors said they were looking forward to giving their first lectures. Nohrnberg, who received his doctorate from Yale, said that he was particularly anticipating his return to Cambridge.

He reminisced about “the standard espresso at the Café Pamplona, the vibrant cultural atmosphere, the jazz at the Regatta Bar, and the Harvard Bookstore.”

“I live in New Haven now, which has no good bookstores,” Nohrnberg said.

According to Buell, the department is happy to have secured the three new scholars for Harvard.

“It doesn’t always work out so well. We were thinking conservatively that we might get two new colleagues,” Buell said. “Three is wonderful.”

The English Department has already announced the appointment of two senior faculty—Daniel Albright and Assistant Professor of English Leah Price ’91.

The department is also working on the appointment of two more senior faculty members in Medievalism and Americanism.

—Staff writer Ben A. Black can be reached at bblack@fas.harvard.edu.