English Department Fills Faculty Spots

With almost half of its 35 faculty members set to go on leave next year, the Department of English has mounted an unusually aggressive push to recruit new professors and lecturers, especially scholars of the 20th century.

Chair of the Department of English Lawrence Buell said last week that he had successfully wooed 10 new lecturers, visiting professors, and junior faculty for next year.

In addition, he said that Professor James Simpson of Cambridge University has accepted a senior faculty position as a medievalist.

Buell said the new hires “represent a success, after many, many years, of bringing the department up to its full authorized strength.”

“We have been under our allotment ever since I arrived at Harvard in 1990,” Buell said.

Next year, 15 English professors out of the department’s 35 current faculty members will be taking a full- or half-year leave.

Simpson, whom Buell called “one of the world’s most eminent figures in medieval studies,” will himself not be here until the fall of 2004. Simpson’s interests include the role of imagination in medieval literature and its impact on medieval culture as a whole.

According to Buell, Simpson got word during the recruitment process that he had received a prestigious two-year British Academy Fellowship—which he would have to give up in order to accept Harvard’s offer. Buell said that the department did not wish to deprive Simpson of the benefits of that fellowship, and so offered him a leave package for next year.

“Obviously the most desirable thing from Harvard’s standpoint is to get him here as soon as possible,” Buell said. “But I think we’re lucky to get him here with only a year’s delay and not two.”

Simpson wrote in an e-mail that coming to Harvard would be a welcome change.

“When Harvard decides it wants someone, it’s hard to resist,” Simpson wrote. “And why would one want to? I have been working in an underfunded university system for 22 years now.”

Buell said Simpson’s recruitment completed a reconstruction of the department’s offerings in medievalism after the retirement of former Gurney Professor of English Literature Derek A. Pearsall and former Higginson Professor of English Larry D. Benson in the late 1990s.

Simpson wrote that he was confident that the department could be restored into “a centre of innovative, welcoming research in this field.”

A senior faculty position has also been offered to Professor Louis Menand of the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, who has not yet decided if he will accept the offer. Menand, who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

If Menand accepted, he would join three new assistant professors in 20th century studies next year.

James Wood, a prominent literary critic and writer for The New Republic, will also be teaching two classes next year. Buell said that the focus this year on recruiting 20th century scholars is part of a conscious effort to modernize the department.

“I think it will be a very nice addition to have a figure like Menand, if he accepts the appointment, who is so networked into the contemporary scene of arts and letters.” Buell said. “We don’t think of ourselves as an ivy tower operation, we think of ourselves as serious scholars who want to communicate beyond the academy as well as inside it.”

The English department has also been expanding its creative writing teaching staff. Poet Peter Richards and novelist Zadie Smith, writer of the acclaimed book White Teeth, will both offer instruction in the creative writing program next year, according to Buell. Novelist Katherine Vaz will fill the position left vacant by current Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction Patricia Powell next year.

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