English Department Adds Professors

The English department will welcome two new professors from Columbia University and grant tenure to one of its current associate professors.

Amanda J. Claybaugh, an expert from Columbia on 19th-century novels, will join the English and American Literature and Languages Department as a professor next fall, according to a press release from Tuesday.

The department will also add Martin Puchner, a co-chair of Columbia University’s Ph.D. theater program, and Harvard associate professor of English Stephen L. Burt as full professors, according to English Department Chair James T. Engell ’73.

Claybaugh, who is currently an associate professor at Columbia University, received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2001 and was a visiting professor at Harvard in 2007 and 2008. Claybaugh—who is currently on leave abroad—said in an e-mail that she was excited by the changes in concentration requirements within the English department, which are moving “away from ‘Brit Lit’ and ‘US Lit’ and toward courses that follow literary works as they cross national boundaries.”

While no final decisions regarding class curricula have been made, Claybaugh hopes to teach a survey of the bildungsroman—which translates to “novel of education”—around the world.

“The genre [bildungsroman] entails much more than that,” Claybaugh wrote. “The genre asks what it means for a young man or woman to take his or her place in society, and so it explores the kinds of compromises and accommodations that society requires.”

Claybaugh also said that she values challenges from students. “For me, the best moment in a semester comes when the students start arguing with me—I think of it as my responsibility, at the beginning of each course, to establish a useful framework for literary analysis,” she wrote. “Arguing with the framework shows that [students are] really thinking for themselves.”

Puchner, who is also from Columbia and also on leave, will teach courses in modern drama and theater. He attended Harvard Summer School in the late 1980s and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1998. In an e-mailed statement, Puchner wrote that he was “excited to be back for good.”

Puchner’s appointment is part of a long-term effort to strengthen the drama offerings in the English Department, according to Engell.

“I would like to build bridges to [Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club] and the [American Repertory Theater], especially since Harvard is moving to give the arts, including theater, a more important place,” Puchner wrote. “When I teach drama, it’s important to me to convey what happens when a dramatic text is performed on stage: it’s a thrilling but also mysterious process...” he added.

Associate professor Stephen L. Burt is well known among English students for his unique course on science fiction. His recent book “Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry” was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

“When people are laudatory of professors they tend to say he had a passion for the subject, but I dont think I could say that with enough emphasis,” said Alexander J. Pease ’10, who took Burt’s class last semester. “That’s truly how Professor Burt comes across, you could tell how much the subject meant to him.”

—Staff writer James K. McAuley can be reached at mcauley@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Julia L. Ryan can be reached at jryan@college.harvard.edu.