The University catalogue for 1854-55 describes the study of English as “designed chiefly to establish fundamental principles of criticism and to cultivate correctness and propriety of style.” Texts from English literature entered the curriculum initially as rhetorical models, supplementing Greek and Latin ones. Under a few early professors (Erastus Haven, Andrew Dickson White, Moses Coit Tyler) the study of English grew to embrace philology and then literary history as well as rhetoric and eventually American as well as English literature. Courses in literary “masterpieces” became a staple of the curriculum. The Department of Rhetoric split off from what was then known as the Department of English and Rhetoric in 1903 and under the leadership of Fred Newton Scott took responsibility for instruction in rhetoric and composition, also offering courses in journalism and creative writing. By 1930 the rationale for maintaining a separate Department of Rhetoric was no longer compelling, and it was reabsorbed into what became the Department of English Language and Literature.
The mission statement that currently appears on the departmental website, which has superseded the catalogue as the source of official information, suggests how far the present department has come from the original aim of cultivating “correctness and propriety of style” through the study of a few classic works of English literature. The mid-nineteenth century ideal now seems quaint, more suited to a gentlemanly elite than to the Michigan undergraduates of today, and it would be difficult to find faculty who would agree that the fundamental principles of criticism are self-evident. The stated aims of the present department embrace four related activities: “surveying and analyzing the diverse range of texts in the English language; researching and teaching the rich history of that language; fostering exceptional creative as well as critical writing; and studying texts in relation to other cultural phenomena.” The department continues to regard teaching writing, creative as well as expository and analytical, as one of its central responsibilities and remains committed to the study of the history of English language, one of the Michigan department’s distinguishing strengths. Yet its purview now extends well beyond English and American literature, to texts in English (Anglophone literature) representing a variety of nations and cultures, and the faculty study these texts in relation to cultural and social contexts, often drawing upon methodologies from other disciplines. This faculty has become strikingly more diverse ethnically, far more open to women, and more pluralistic in its aims and its scholarly and creative pursuits. The pace of change has accelerated over the past several decades, as the department has undergone a series of dramatic transformations, in the process significantly improving its national reputation.
The appointment as chair of Russell Fraser, a prominent Renaissance scholar then chairing the Vanderbilt English department, marked the beginning of the modern history of Michigan’s department. Fraser was the first chair to be appointed from outside and served for five years (1968-73), breaking the tradition of long-serving heads of department appointed from within; his predecessor, Warner G. Rice, had served from 1948 to 1967. Fraser managed to reduce the standard teaching load from three to two courses a semester and overhauled salary and promotion procedures, broadening participation by introducing faculty subcommittees in both areas. He pushed to increase the scholarly productivity of the faculty and raise the national visibility of the department, in line with college expectations. Under Fraser’s leadership the department continued to be known for outstanding undergraduate teaching, in lower-level courses as well as advanced ones, and for outreach to the community in the form of involvement with high schools and with extension teaching, strongly encouraged in the Rice era. The undergraduate curriculum was liberalized, however, by the introduction of new kinds of thematic and generic courses, including film and “black literature.” Fraser founded a new undergraduate program that he would subsequently direct, the Medieval and Renaissance Collegium. In the Ph.D. program exam-based sequences of courses replaced requirements intended to assure comprehensive coverage, allowing for more specialization.
Fraser’s tenure as chair was marked by several notable senior appointments, including Joseph Blotner, author of the definitive biography of William Faulkner, and Robert Hayden, the widely recognized African-American poet and Detroit native who would subsequently become Poetry Consultant of the Library of Congress (a position now known as Poet Laureate). Albert Marckwardt returned to Michigan as a member of the English Department (he had been the first chair of Linguistics) after retiring from Princeton. Modernist and Yeats scholar George Bornstein and Ira Konigsberg, an eighteenth-century scholar who would become one of the first to teach and write about film at Michigan, joined the faculty as associate professors. Fraser’s assistant professor hires included John Kucich, a scholar of Victorian fiction; Americanist Robert Weisbuch; eighteenth-century scholar Lincoln Faller; and Eric Rabkin, an expert in narrative theory who would become known for teaching and writing about science fiction and fantasy. In the early 1970s eighteenth-century scholar Emily Cloyd became the first woman to earn tenure in English. The fundamental change in the direction of the department promoted by Fraser triggered vigorous resistance from some faculty, including senior members of an executive committee newly liberated from the sway of a powerful, long-serving chair. Discord rooted in differences over expectations regarding hiring, promotion, and merit pay persisted for several years. It was exacerbated by a sharp decline in the promotion rate for untenured faculty, partly as a result of denials at the college level, and reached a climax during the short tenure of Fraser’s successor as chair, John L. Styan (1973-74), one of the pioneers of “performance criticism” of drama. After a year of departmental turmoil, Styan resigned to become chair and Andrew Mellon Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
The department was in danger of being placed in receivership by the College over concerns about its ability to govern itself when Jay Robinson, who had been trained in English linguistics and then broadened his interests to include literacy and composition, was appointed as chair to replace Styan. During his tenure (1974-81) Robinson succeeded in establishing a new tone and reviving the morale of the faculty while sustaining the effort to raise the department’s scholarly profile. He lured two senior scholars from Indiana University, Martha Vicinus and Robert Lewis. Vicinus, an internationally prominent scholar of nineteenth-century labor and feminist literature and history and the first female full professor in the department, would go on to become director of the Program in Women’s Studies and then chair of English. In 1994 she was appointed Distinguished University Professor of English, Women’s Studies, and History. Lewis, an accomplished medievalist, would succeed Sherman Kuhn as editor of the Middle English Dictionary (MED) and bring that internationally acclaimed project to completion in 2001, 71 years after work on it had begun at Michigan in 1930. Robinson also brought C.A. Patrides from York University, bolstering an area of traditional strength at Michigan by adding a major scholar of English Renaissance literature. American literature scholar James McIntosh was hired from Yale University as an associate professor. Assistant professor appointments included medievalists Macklin Smith and Thomas Toon; Alan Wald, specializing in the literature of the American Left; and Enoch Brater, an expert in modern drama who left the University of Pennsylvania to come to Michigan.
Robinson faced a period of declining undergraduate and graduate enrollments and steady erosion of faculty strength, from 82 full-time equivalent faculty (FTEs) in 1971 to 67 in 1978 and from 37 assistant professors to 13 over the same period. Declines in undergraduate enrollment and English concentrators could be explained partly by a severe drop in teaching certificate candidates and the popularity of the college’s new Bachelor of General Studies degree, but they also mirrored a national trend. The department responded by simplifying requirements for the concentration in 1975, replacing a system based on large survey courses with one that required a series of three core courses offered in independent, faculty-taught sections that featured selected major writers. The new requirements offered greater freedom in the choice of electives and represented a move away from the ideal of comprehensive coverage. A required senior seminar would be added later, and more faculty would be assigned to courses intended for students in their first two years. The department also intensified efforts to attract non-concentrators by creating new thematic, upper level courses and aggressively publicizing them, prompting a move to college-wide publication of course descriptions. Enrollments began to rise again as this strategy took effect. In 1973 Walter Clark and Alan Howes had begun a summer New England Literature Program (NELP) based in New Hampshire that would prove extremely popular with undergraduates. A new graduate degree created primarily to train students for community college teaching, the Doctor of Arts, had been introduced in 1971.
While chair Robinson served as Executive Director of the MED, helping to secure major grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) that made it possible to hire additional editorial staff to accelerate work on the dictionary. Robinson also collaborated with Daniel Fader in a successful effort to establish an English Composition Board (ECB) reporting to the dean, which was empowered by a vote of the LS&A faculty in 1978 to administer the introductory composition requirement and a new upper level writing requirement that could be met by courses taught in departments across the college. He would later succeed Fader as director of the ECB. Whereas the MED built upon Michigan’s traditional strength in philology and editing, involvement with the ECB reflected the department’s longstanding commitment to rhetoric and the teaching of writing. The creation of the ECB led to reforms in the teaching of introductory composition and a revival of the departmental tradition of involvement in K-12 education. With substantial support from the Mellon Foundation, the ECB sponsored faculty-led workshops in Michigan high schools and summer conferences in Ann Arbor for high school teachers. Bernard van t’Hul and Richard Bailey, a leading scholar of the history of the English language and of lexicography committed to working with schools and community colleges, participated in these activities along with Robinson and Fader. Departmental initiatives in the 1980s would involve ongoing workshops for Rogers City, Michigan, schools on the teaching of writing and William Alexander’s work with Detroit students in connection with his course in Theater and Social Change. Alexander would subsequently develop the Prison Creative Arts Program (PCAP), beginning with a theater workshop in 1990 and growing to include annual exhibitions of prisoners’ art accompanied by a series of related events. The work by Alexander and his students with Michigan prisoners, in collaboration with Janie Paul of the School of Art and Design, would gain national recognition, and. Alexander would be named University Professor of the Year in 2006 by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).
During the late 1960s and 1970s the department began compiling annual lists of faculty by areas of primary interest. In addition to traditional historical periods these included major genres (poetry, drama, fiction), a cluster of areas related to the department’s commitment to the teaching of English language and rhetoric (language, composition, pedagogy), and also the newly popular area of critical theory, reflecting the surge of interest in theory across the profession. A Committee on Scholarly and Creative Activities (COSCA) sponsored scholarly presentations by faculty and a series of poetry readings by visiting poets. More women were hired (Americanists Julie Ellison and June Howard and modernist Margot Norris as well as Vicinus), and active efforts to hire minority faculty continued, with Carolyn Gipson and fiction writer Gayl Jones joining the faculty in this period. Lemuel Johnson, poet and critic of African and Caribbean literature, had been hired in 1968 and became actively involved in developing the Center for African-American and African Studies (CAAS), becoming its director in 1985.
Renaissance scholar John Knott was appointed to succeed Robinson but delayed the beginning of his term to serve as Acting Dean of the College for the academic year 1980-81, taking over as chair in January of 1982. Ejner Jensen, who as Associate Chair under Robinson had played an important role in calming the departmental discontent that Robinson inherited, served as Acting Chair for the fall of 1982. Knott urged his colleagues to establish a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program that would build on Michigan’s history of hiring writers as regular and visiting faculty and supporting creative writing through the nationally known Hopwood Awards for student writers. The MFA program was launched in 1983 with newly hired fiction writer George Garrett as director and with the hope that teaching opportunities in a burgeoning undergraduate creative writing program and the prospect of winning Hopwood Awards, along with an augmented writing faculty, would be sufficient to attract students until additional means of support could be found. When Garrett left to accept an endowed chair at the University of Virginia in 1985, fiction writer Nicholas Delbanco was hired from Bennington College to replace him. During Delbanco’s directorship (1985-2002) the program grew to become one of the best in the country, with graduates bringing it recognition through prize-winning publications and with applications steadily increasing, from 28 in 1983 to 300 by 1992. MFA students became a presence in graduate courses in literature, required by the program in addition to writing workshops, and largely took over the teaching of introductory courses in creative writing.
Knott hired poets Richard Tillinghast and Alice Fulton to teach in the MFA program and Tobin Siebers (from Columbia University) to fill a pressing need in critical theory. Anne Gere was appointed jointly with the School of Education to teach courses in rhetoric and pedagogy and contribute to the Ph. D. Program in English and Education, which she would subsequently direct, initially as co-director with Robinson. Gere would later become President of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), following several predecessors in the department in holding that position. Knott pursued a strategy of hiring promising associate professors early in their careers that would become common practice as the department sought to build the strength of the faculty rapidly. In addition to Gere, Siebers, and Tillinghast, Victorian scholar Herbert Tucker joined the faculty as a tenured associate professor during this period, as did Miltonist and restoration scholar James Turner and eighteenth-century scholar James Winn, soon to publish what would be recognized as the definitive biography of John Dryden. As the quality of appointments rose, the department increasingly found itself having to defend against outside offers in competitions that it sometimes lost. After several years Tucker left for the University of Virginia and Turner for the University of California at Berkeley. Winn eventually left to become chair at Boston University. Such losses were unwelcome but signalled that English was coming to resemble stronger LSA departments in attracting highly sought after faculty. Assistant professor appointments from the 1980s included Renaissance scholar Michael Schoenfeldt; Kerry Larson in American literature; Michael Awkward in African-American literature; and the first departmental couple, Linda Gregerson and new historicist Steven Mullaney, both Renaissance scholars and Gregerson also a poet who would come to play an important role in the MFA program. The departmental commitment to studies of dramatic performance, pursued by Enoch Brater among others, was strengthened by the appointment of director and critic John Russell Brown as chair of Theatre and Drama and Professor of English and that of theater critic Benedict Nightingale as Professor of English.
During this period the department began fundraising efforts supported by the college, chiefly by hosting gatherings of Hopwood winners in Ann Arbor and New York. It also worked through differences with the ECB having to do with authority over introductory composition courses, laying the foundation for a more cooperative relationship in the future. As the MFA program became established, many more visiting writers came to campus, some for short-term residencies. More lecturers came as well, as faculty hosted lecture series and conferences that brought the department into the mainstream of the profession. Knott and John D’Arms, chair of Classical Studies, collaborated in planning a new Humanities Institute at the request of the provost and the dean of LS&A. They were joined on a small planning committee that defined the aims and structure of the Institute by the deans of LS&A and the School of Music (Peter Steiner and Paul Boylan) and Domna Stanton of Romance Languages. Knott would serve as Interim Director for the Institute’s startup year, and Winn would become the Institute’s first Director.
By the mid-1980s undergraduate enrollments were increasing at the rate of ten percent a year, with Weisbuch energetically promoting new and revamped courses as Associate Chair, and the number of English concentrators had risen to 600 from a low of just over 200 in 1975. The curricular reforms of the 1970s made the concentration more attractive, and large lecture courses such as those offered by Rabkin and Ralph Williams grew in popularity. Disputes over the canon of English and American literature were spreading in the profession, however, and these were reflected in departmental debates. The principle of pluralism in critical approaches as well as in scholarly and pedagogical aims was well established in the department by this time, and new approaches and interests were reflected in assistant professor appointments such as that of Anne Herrmann to teach feminist criticism and theory and Anita Norich to teach Yiddish American literature. Traditionalists co-existed, sometimes uneasily, with others who advocated more active efforts to expand the curriculum to include literature by women and minorities. The consensus about what should be required of English concentrators was dissolving, with commitment to the idea of a “core” of canonical texts weakening as disagreements about what should be included increased. The time was ripe for another round of curricular change, and also an escalation in the hiring of minority faculty, when Weisbuch was appointed chair.
Weisbuch’s tenure as chair (1987-1994) was marked by fundamental changes in the undergraduate and graduate programs and in the composition of the faculty. With June Howard as his Associate Chair, Weisbuch initiated discussions that led to broadening the traditional canon, first through a vigorously debated but ultimately embraced New Traditions requirement (1988) that concentrators take a course in minority literature or literature written by women, then through a thorough revision of existing requirements (1990-91). The core courses were dropped in favor of a structure intended to ensure some chronological distribution of elections and the inclusion of American literature but with less concern for communicating a sense of literary history. A new preprequisite designed to expose students to a variety of critical approaches early in their careers (What Is Literature?) was added and the senior seminar made optional. The well-regarded English honors program, which had existed in some form since 1924, continued to offer a sequence of seven courses spanning English and American literature, with one of these now devoted to critical theory. An alternate honors track was established for students who preferred to design an individualized program with a faculty member, along with a new honors track in creative writing. By the early 1990s the number of concentrators in English had risen to over 1000, and enrollments in English courses generally had almost doubled since 1979.
Applications to graduate programs had quadrupled over the previous decade, partly because of the addition of an MFA program, but dissatisfaction with the role of the MA program had grown. The department decided to discontinue admitting students to a separate masters program and instead admit a smaller number directly to the Ph.D. program, finding a way to guarantee first-year fellowship support as well as support for three additional years through teaching. Qualifiying exams were simplified, and a third-term review replaced the use of the masters program to screen prospective Ph.D. students. One effect of the changes was to make the department more competitive in the annual effort to recruit top graduate students. In 1990 admission to the DA program was suspended, a reflection of declining interest on the part of concerned faculty as well as a dearth of applicants. The small Ph.D. program in English and Education remained strong, typically recruiting about five new students with prior teaching experience a year and consistently placing its graduates. The program began to focus on literacy and composition theory as well as teacher training under the leadership of Robinson and Gere. The MFA program continued to become more competitive with the top programs as regular and visiting faculty were added and more University resources were found to use for student support in the first year.
Weisbuch strengthened the department’s cohort of writers by appointing poet Thylias Moss and fiction writer Charles Baxter, who would become a mainstay of the MFA program. Leonard Barkan joined the faculty from Northwestern as Professor of English and Art History, buttressing a Renaissance group still recovering from the untimely death of Patrides in 1986. The ranks of departmental medievalists, depleted by retirements, were augmented by the addition of Theresa Tinkle and Karla Taylor, the latter coming from Yale University as an associate professor. Americanists Jonathan Freedman, also from Yale, and Patricia Yaeger, from Harvard University, were appointed as associate professors. Marjorie Levinson, a new historicist working on English romanticism, was hired from the University of Pennsylvania as a professor. Weisbuch took advantage of the University’s Target of Opportunity program to increase the department’s minority representation dramatically. Simon Gikandi, originally from Kenya and an expert in African and Caribbean literature and postcolonial theory, joined the department as an associate professor, along with Stephen Sumida, who specialized in Asian-Pacific literature. Marlon Ross came as an associate professor as well, on an appointment split between the department and CAAS. A series of assistant professor appointments (Sandra Gunning, Rafia Zafar, Veronica Gregg, David Artis) further increased the department’s commitment to African-American and African literature. Other junior appointments of Asian-American and Latino faculty, including Rei Terada in English and Comparative Literature, were made possible by the Target of Opportunity program and a strategy of embracing joint appointments with LS&A programs. Trading four lecturer positions for three junior faculty ones and committing more faculty to introductory courses made possible further assistant professor appointments, including that of modernist John Whittier-Ferguson. The addition of thirty new faculty in five years during Weisbuch’s tenure as chair raised the overall strength of the department to 71 full-time-equivalent faculty (up from 60 in 1987). It also changed the demographics of the faculty, increasing the representation of women, a majority of those hired during this period, as well as that of minorities. A new category that appeared on the list of faculty by areas in a 5-year plan prepared in 1992, “Ethnic and Global Literatures in English,” reflected a significant shift in the department’s understanding of the scope of its mission.
Another kind of shift, in staffing of lower level writing and literature courses, was taking place during this period. While the department was assigning more faculty to these courses, including some to a new literature-based course in introductory composition, it was also relying increasingly on lecturers to teach lower level courses. The lecturer cohort was anchored by a group of nine senior lecturers chosen for their excellence as teachers and appointed to three-year terms. Under William Ingram as Director of Composition, they assumed a major role in training graduate students who were beginning their teaching experience. The increased use of lecturers, including a larger number appointed to one-year terms, was necessary in part to compensate for the declining number of doctoral students teaching composition courses and some introductory literature courses as graduate student instructors (GSIs). At this time the department was also contributing approximately 4.5 faculty FTEs to directing and teaching in interdisciplinary LS&A programs. English was supplying much of the leadership of these programs, with implications for the department’s ability to cover its own courses. In the early 1990s English faculty directed CAAS, Women’s Studies, American Culture, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics as well as the English Composition Board and the Institute for the Humanities.
Faculty were publishing a growing stream of books, copies of which were prominently displayed in the chair’s office. They were hosting major conferences (on Robert Hayden, editorial theory and the editing of modernist texts, and minority literatures). They were increasingly winning national fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), and NEH. Several conducted summer institutes for teachers funded by NEH, and several more spent a year as fellows of the National Humanities Center. English was well represented among faculty and graduate student fellows of the Humanities Institute, given a year to pursue writing projects in a community that fostered interdisciplinary work. The influx of new faculty, many in emerging fields, had an energizing effect and contributed to the gradual rise in the department’s standing in national rankings.
Weisbuch’s successor as chair, Martha Vicinus (1994-98), oversaw the relocation of the department from Haven Hall to the upper floors of Angell Hall and an adjoining floor of a new building connecting Haven and Angell, Tisch Hall. Faculty and graduate student instructors shared the new space in Tisch, along with the offices of a newly constituted First and Second Year Studies Program, the successor to the introductory composition program. The main departmental offices and a majority of the faculty offices moved to spacious, renovated quarters in Angell that included attractive new public space suitable for hosting meetings and visiting speakers. This period also saw the transformation of the ECB in 1998 into the endowed Gayle Sweetland Writing Center, dedicated to the study of composition and pedagogy by graduate students and faculty across the college. A series of directors drawn from English (Tinkle, Jensen, Vicinus, Gere) would strengthen the links of the Sweetland Center with the department and expand its activities to include appointing faculty fellows from other LS&A departments, sponsoring national conferences, offering a range of writing courses for graduate as well as undergraduate students, and conducting research on writing. Many of its lecturers would be drawn from the ranks of recent graduates of the MFA program, and some would be jointly appointed with English.
Under Vicinus the department reorganized lower-division courses, making all of them writing intensive and committing more tenure-track faculty to teaching at this level, an effort recognized by an LS&A departmental award for undergraduate teaching. Periodic reviews of lecturers on continuing appointments were instituted, to ensure excellence in teaching from this growing cohort. The honors program, directed by Whittier-Ferguson, introduced a new course designed to prepare students for writing the honors thesis and, thanks to a generous donor, established the John Wagner Prize for the best thesis of the year and began to support student research trips. An annual Honors Convocation in which students described their theses to an audience of parents, faculty, and friends as part of graduation activities had been established by this time. A new joint Ph.D. program in English and Women’s Studies was launched in 1995. Faculty members continued to be recognized for outstanding undergraduate teaching. An impressive number would be named to Thurnau professorships, established by LS&A in 1988 (Rabkin, Williams, Weisbuch, Howard, Tinkle, Whittier-Ferguson, Alexander, Gere, Anne Curzan). Undergraduates voted to recognize three with the Golden Apple award given to the person judged the best teacher in LS&A: Rabkin, senior lecturer John Rubadeau, and Williams twice, the second time with a lifetime award on the eve of his retirement.
In February 1997, Vicinus convened the first meeting of a new English Advisory Board made up of highly successful graduates with a continuing interest in the activities of the department. Their advice and engagement would give a major boost to departmental fundraising and lead in time to a series of significant gifts, including two establishing awards for graduate student teaching (the David and Linda Moscow Prizes and the Ben Prize for outstanding teaching by a lecturer, honoring alumnus Laurence Kirschbaum). The department decided to shrink the Ph.D. program further in response to the scarcity of tenure-track jobs, a reflection of the fact that institutions of higher education had begun to rely on more adjunct faculty as their budgets were cut. Meanwhile, the MFA program continued to rise in national reputation. Moss and Fulton both won MacArthur awards, and Baxter won a Leila Wallace—Readers’ Digest fellowship. His novel The Feast of Love, set largely in Ann Arbor, would be chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction for 2000.
With fellow Victorian scholar John Kucich as her Associate Chair, Vicinus hired modernist Suzanne Raitt and Renaissance and feminist scholar Valerie Traub as associate professors. Sidonie Smith, known for her work on autobiographical writing by women, joined the faculty as Director of Women’s Studies and Professor of English. Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison augmented the department’s growing contingent of creative writers. Fiction writer Eileen Pollack was hired to direct the undergraduate creative writing program (she would subsequently join the tenure-track faculty as an assistant professor). Assistant professors appointed during this period included Yopie Prins, specializing in Victorian poetry and translation; eighteenth-century scholar David Porter; Adela Pinch in nineteenth-century British literature, and Susan Scott Parrish in early American literature.
Vicinus, supported by the department’s Executive Committee, set high standards for scholarship. A cluster of negative decisions in tenure cases by the Executive Committee generated enough discontent, particularly among recently hired faculty, to complicate faculty governance. Vicinus decided to return to her busy scholarly career a year early, and Tobin Siebers agreed to serve as Interim Chair for 1998-99. His brief tenure was marked by a series of important appointments, including fiction writer Peter Ho Davies, modernist Sara Blair, Alisse Portnoy in rhetoric, and Xiomara Santamarina and Ifeoma Nwankwo in African-American studies. David Halperin joined the department as a collegiate professor, strengthening the growing presence in gender and sexuality studies; he would subsequently be named Distinguished University Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality.
Lincoln Faller, chair from 1999 to 2002, presided over a period of celebrations. The completion of the MED in 2001 was celebrated at the annual conference of medievalists in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as well as locally. It subsequently would become available online, along with selected medieval texts and bibliographic resources, in the Middle English Compendium edited by Frances McSparran, faculty medievalist and longtime associate editor of the dictionary. Writers and editors from around the country gathered for a conference honoring Lawrence Goldstein for his transformation of the Michigan Quarterly Review into a highly regarded general quarterly, known for special issues on such subjects as The Automobile and American Culture and the Secret Spaces of Childhood, in twenty-five years as editor. The twentieth year of the MFA program was celebrated by a reunion that drew many of its graduates back to Ann Arbor. The occasion coincided with an unusually rich time for visiting writers (including Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott) and the creation of the Helen Herzog Zell professorship for visiting writers of fiction.
This period was marked by efforts to redefine traditional areas of study that would continue as faculty rethought assumptions about what literature should be studied and what contexts were relevant to understanding it. These were encouraged by the formation of faculty interest groups, with the help of funds from the college, to encourage collaborative activity by faculty in particular areas. A related aim was to recapture the attention of faculty with joint appointments who were finding their intellectual homes in the interdisciplinary programs in which they held an appointment. As joint appointments multiplied with the University’s growing emphasis on interdisciplinary work the possible costs to the intellectual life of the department were becoming apparent, as were the possibilities for difficulties at promotion time. The department had to learn to strike a balance between encouraging faculty to play active roles in the interdisciplinary life of the college and university and claiming their allegiance.
The rethinking of fields took a variety of forms, reflecting and in some cases helping to shape national trends in the discipline. With Schoenfeldt as director the Medieval and Renaissance Collegium became the Program for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) and extended its reach to the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The growing use of the term early modern in preference to Renaissance studies suggested the greater engagement with history and culture by faculty working in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature. Faculty in American literature offered a course titled “What is American Literature?” in which they juxtaposed newer or neglected texts in American literature (Native American, Latino, African American, Asian American) with classic ones. At about the same time Gere was enlisting other faculty as well as English graduate students in a national project known as Making American Literatures that involved bringing high school and university faculties together to rethink the teaching of American literature by asking what new writers, representing different ethnicities, should be included and how the definition of literature should be broadened. Through this project summer workshops funded by the university and area school systems as well as NEH explored new approaches with secondary school teachers.
Appointments under Faller continued the trend of reinvigorating traditional areas while developing new ones. Fiction writer Reginald McKnight was appointed in creative writing. Distinguished Canadian translator and poet Anne Carson also joined the faculty, with joint appointments in Comparative Literature and Classical Studies, leaving after several years to accept a position at New York University. Assistant professor appointments included Anne Curzan in rhetoric and English language, Joshua Miller in twentieth-century American, Catherine Sanok in medieval, Julian Levinson in Jewish American literature and the Frankel Center of Judaic Studies, Susan Najita in Asian American and Pacific Island studies, and Andrea Zemgulys in nineteenth and twentieth-century British. Areas of specialization became increasingly difficult to characterize as the interests of faculty grew more wide-ranging and interdisciplinary and the boundaries between genres and historical periods more fluid.
This period saw the first of several residencies by England’s Royal Shakespeare Company, with marathon performances of the three parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI followed by Richard III. Williams acted as instigator and liaison for a related series of class visits and presentations, a role that he would continue to play in future residencies. English climbed from 14th to 11th in the latest U.S News and World Report ranking of Ph.D. programs, continuing its rise from 17th in the 1980s, and the MFA program was ranked 6th. The addition of an assistant director of the MFA program would prove important to its future development, making it possible to mount more ambitious schedules of visiting writers as well as to deal with increasing demands on the faculty director. In a significant policy change, the department moved from having tenured members of the Executive Committee decide on tenure recommendations to involving the whole tenured faculty in these decisions. Faller oversaw the transition, establishing expectations about the responsibility of faculty for informing themselves about the candidates and developing procedures to be followed in the deliberations.
As Interim Chair for 2002-3 Patricia Yaeger presided over the department in a difficult budgetary environment in which it was nonetheless possible to continue to make some appointments. Poet and translator Khaled Mattawa added further diversity to the faculty of the MFA Program with his background in Arabic literary tradition. Gregg Crane joined the department as an associate professor, with interests in law and literature (and a law degree) as well as nineteenth-century American. Assistant Professor Jennifer Wenzel brought expertise in African and South Asian literatures in English and in postcolonial theory. The department continued to support outreach activities, including the work of Delbanco and other writers with the Detroit Writers in the Schools program and that of Ellison with the national Imagining America project on artists and writers in public life that she directed. It also assumed responsibility, with LS&A, for the annual Bear River Writers’ Conference, founded by Tillinghast to bring together aspiring local writers and nationally known ones in a northern Michigan setting on Walloon Lake,
Sidonie Smith, who served as chair from 2003 to 2009, had earned undergraduate and masters degrees from the department in a very different era for women, the early to mid 1960s. As chair, she pursued a policy of “maintaining the best of the old while pursuing the best of the new” in literary, rhetorical, linguistic, and cultural studies, aided by Freedman as associate chair. Lucy Hartley and Daniel Hack were hired as associate professors to strengthen a contingent in nineteenth-century British literature diminished by the retirement of Vicinus and the departure of Kucich to Rutgers University. The appointment of poet A. Van Jordan from the University of Texas as a professor as well as fiction writer Michael Byers and poet and fiction writer Laura Kasischke as assistant professors renewed the faculty of the MFA program, depleted by departures including those of Fulton, McKnight, Baxter, and Tillinghast (to retirement). Michael Awkward, who had left earlier to accept a position at the University of Pennsylvania, was persuaded to return to Michigan as Professor of English and African-American Studies. A series of assistant professor appointments added faculty in traditional fields with new interests and critical approaches: Gillian White in modern British and American poetry and poetics; Megan Sweeney in twentieth-century American, joint with CAAS; Christina Lupton in seventeenth and eighteenth-century British; Sean Silver in eighteenth-century British. Victor Mendoza, with an appointment in Women’s Studies as well as English, added to the departmental presence in minority literatures and gender and sexuality studies. Several appointments broadened and invigorated the department’s evolving commitment to performance studies. Assistant Professor Amy Carroll brought training in anthropology and expertise in Latin American performance. Associate Professor Petra Kuppers added a broader understanding of what constitutes performance and also expertise in disability studies, an emerging field that Siebers played a significant role in defining through his theoretical and personal writing. Professor W. B. Worthen, a leader in studies of dramatic performance with his work on Shakespeare and modern drama, joined the department from the University of California, Berkeley, and remained for several years before departing for Columbia University. Well-known Shakespearean scholar Barbara Hodgdon became a member of the faculty after retiring from Drake University. By 2008 the gender balance of the department would have shifted to the point that the ranks of the tenure-track faculty contained more women than men, reflecting a shift that was occurring in much of the profession.
The scope of English studies, nationally as well as at Michigan, was continuing to expand as faculty interests became more comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary. Modernists explored various “modernisms,” and Americanists began to describe themselves as specializing in U.S. literatures. In their teaching as well as their research faculty in traditional fields expanded their sense of what texts and methodologies were relevant and moved beyond a single-minded focus on national literatures. Some played active roles in interdisciplinary initiatives involving colleagues from other departments, including a popular one in Atlantic Studies. Global and postcolonial literature, ethnic literatures, and gender and sexuality studies claimed increasing attention, along with emerging critical fields. In addition to disability studies, visual culture studies attracted faculty including Blair, Porter, Hartley, and Zemgulys. Other faculty (S. Smith and Wenzel in addition to Crane) were drawn to issues involving the relationship of law and literature, including human rights. Ecocriticism, claiming growing attention in the profession as environmental issues prompted new ways of looking at literary texts, became an interest for faculty including Knott, Parrish, Wenzel, and Yaeger. Knott chaired faculty committees appointed by the dean that planned and implemented an interdisciplinary Program in the Environment for undergraduates, administered jointly by LS&A and the School of Natural Resources and Environment, and served as interim director for its first year and a half.
One of the most significant developments of the first decade of the twenty-first century was the growing impact of digitization on departmental and professional life. Bailey and Ingram had pioneered work in digital humanities, and Rabkin would teach a course in the humanities and technology and become the faculty in-house expert on digital technologies and resources, including the University library’s rapidly expanding collection of data bases and digitized texts. A regularly updated departmental website became the primary means of communicating with students and the public. Faculty used the web to circulate course materials and to extend class discussion and interactions with students online. The Sweetland Writing Center struck out into new territory by offering courses in digital media, including one in the rhetoric of blogging, responding to a fundamental shift in modes of communication that English faculty were beginning to respond to as well in their teaching and their professional lives. In 2011 the department would take a first step toward engaging with the new field of digital humanities by appointing Tung-Hui Hu, who came with an undergraduate degree in computer science as well as a Ph.D. in rhetoric (and an MFA in creative writing).
Near the beginning of Smith’s time as chair, lecturers formed the Lecturers’ Employee Organization (LEO). Graduate students had unionized in the mid-1970s, creating the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO). Smith, along with Curzan as director of First and Second Year Studies, took the lead in working through issues associated with signing the first contract with LEO and developed a systematized review process that served as a model for the college. This period also saw the completion of a planning process begun under Faller that produced a departmental Strategic Plan in 2003 and a comprehensive internal review document in 2006. A revision of the requirements for the concentration introduced subconcentrations and substituted a new prerequisite, Introduction to Literary Studies, for one introduced in the late 1980s (What is Literature?). In a subsequent revision the second prerequisite, Introduction to Poetry, would be abandoned in favor of an upper-level requirement of a course in poetry. The number of concentrators remained relatively high, at 800 in 2003 still the third largest among LS&A departments, although this number would begin to decline. Meanwhile, the demand for writing courses had grown to the point where the department was unable to meet it at the advanced level. About one in three applicants to the subconcentration in creative writing were accepted. The department’s First and Second Year Studies Program (which would become the English Department Writing Program) and the Sweetland Writing Center were actively cooperating, jointly hiring and interviewing lecturers. Sweetland would offer courses in writing at the 200 level as well as a course designed to prepare students for introductory composition, subsequently introducing a writing minor in collaboration with English. The department began to hold a popular commencement ceremony for undergraduate concentrators and their parents, with an outstanding graduate of the department returning as speaker.
The English Ph.D. program had stabilized at twelve to fifteen new students a year, including two in the joint program in English and Women’s Studies. Faculty gave more attention to preparing graduate students for the job market by placing greater emphasis on pedagogy, offering more active mentoring in developing dissertation prospectuses, and providing greater support for job seekers. The English and Education program continued to enroll five to six students annually. The faculty groups initiated by Faller had metamorphosed into thriving interest groups run by graduate students with participation by faculty, some from other departments, and had become a fixture of departmental life. They had sufficient funding to invite visiting as well as local speakers and to organize occasional conferences. Doctoral students were assured of six years of combined fellowship and GSI support, with summer research funding and travel grants available. Two of the subareas of the doctoral program, History of the English Language and Gender and Literature, were ranked in the top five nationally. The department was producing well-trained, professionalized Ph.D. students, although a relatively small number in relation to the size of the faculty and its capacity to offer graduate courses.
By 2010 the MFA Program would be attracting more than 1000 applicants for 22 places and getting acceptances from four out of five of its top choices, thanks in part to a generous gift of $5,000,000 from Sam and Helen Zell that enabled the department to increase fellowship support, solving a funding problem that had become acute because of a decrease in University resources. The Zells gave an additional $500,000 to establish post-MFA fellowships that offered selected graduates a year of support in which to concentrate on their writing. They would later increase their funding to make these fellowships available to all graduates of the program. The expansion of the faculty and of course offerings, including new courses in non-fiction, enhanced the attraction of the Michigan MFA program, which by 2010 would be characterized by the MFA Handbook for prospective students as one of the three best in the country and arguably the best for poetry. Two faculty members, Delbanco and Gregerson, were named Distinguished University Professors, and Gregerson ‘s Magnetic North would be a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry (her previous book had won the largest monetary prize for poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award). Other MFA faculty were winning national awards (including Davies the PEN/Malamud Award for his short fiction and Goodison the British Columbia Prize for her memoir, From Harvey River). Graduates of the program were becoming increasingly visible. Elizabeth Kostova’s first novel, The Historian, made it to the top of The New York Times bestseller list; Patrick O’Keefe’s novella, The Hill Road, won the Story Prize; and Uwem Akwan’s widely acclaimed collection, Say You’re One of Them, was represented in the debut fiction edition of The New Yorker and also selected by Oprah’s Book Club. The events surrounding the 75th anniversary of the Hopwood Awards in 2006, including readings by recent Hopwood winners and a production of Avery Hopwood’s The Gold Diggers at the Mendelssohn Theatre, celebrated Michigan’s longstanding tradition of recognizing talented student writers.
Visiting writers and lecturers were coming to campus with great frequency, some for the annual Heberle lecture and, beginning in 2007, for the Sarah Marwil Lamstein Children’s Literature Lecture. Conferences involving former students and faculty colleagues from other institutions marked a series of retirements: “Responding to the Natural World” (Knott), “Modernism Unbound” (Bornstein), “The Future of Victorian Studies” (Vicinus), “Perspectives on English Language Studies“ (Bailey), “Sacred and Canonical Texts” (Williams). The thirtieth anniversary of NELP, which merited an article on the program in The New York Times, brought many former students back to campus. Their contributions created an endowment fund of $200,000. In 2007 the new Arthur Miller Theatre, named for Michigan’s most distinguished Hopwood winner with his approval, opened with a student production of Miller’s “Playing for Time” and an accompanying symposium on “Global Miller.”
English faculty had played critical roles in founding and developing interdisciplinary programs and had contributed more directors than any other humanities department to Women’s Studies (Vicinus, Smith, Traub, Herrmann), Comparative Literature (Stuart McDougal, Siebers, Gikandi, Prins), and American Culture (McIntosh, Wald, Howard), a program originated by professors Marvin Felheim and Joe Lee Davis. One effect of the involvement of English faculty in interdisciplinary programs and initiatives, in teaching as well as administrative roles, was to accelerate the spread of emerging theoretical developments to faculty of other humanities departments and some social science ones. Departmental faculty also played important roles in college and university administration as associate deans and acting deans of LS&A (Knott, Rabkin, Faller, Schoenfeldt) and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies (Weisbuch, Larson, Howard, Blair). The scholarly and creative accomplishments of English faculty were increasingly recognized by University and LS&A collegiate professorships. Vicinus, Delbanco, Gregerson, and Halperin held Distinguished University professorships. Collegiate professorships had been awarded or soon would be to Bailey, Bornstein, Brater, Carson, Fraser, Freedman, Gikandi, Levinson, Patrides, Schoenfeldt, Siebers, S. Smith,Wald, and Yaeger. Traub would be awarded a Huetwell professorship by the college.
When Schoenfeldt succeeded Smith as chair in January of 2010, after a semester in which Porter served as interim chair, the department faced significant challenges. The University had entered a prolonged period of retrenchment brought on by recession and a sluggish economy, necessitating budget tightening at the departmental level. Enrollments were declining once more, a reflection of a national trend that favored fields perceived as more directly related to job opportunities than the humanities. Yet the department had reached a level of intellectual vitality and prominence that would have been hard to imagine in the mid-1960s. Faculty were editing journals and heading professional societies, regularly winning external as well as internal fellowships and honors, and becoming recognized for their impact on a broad range of fields. Yaeger had become the editor of the profession’s flagship journal, PMLA, and Smith herself had assumed the presidency of the Modern Language Association, the first from Michigan to do so since Fred Newton Scott in 1907. The Michigan English Department continued to be known for its commitment to excellence and innovation in teaching and for its community outreach activities. Teaching writing remained a central concern, now reinforced by a mutually beneficial relationship with the Sweetland Writing Center. The department’s fundraising had grown dramatically, with major gifts from graduates that supported the department’s Strategic Fund, the MFA program, and student awards and enrichment activities. The quality and number of applicants to graduate programs had soared. The last three decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st had seen radical transformations, as the department became strikingly more diverse in its composition and more pluralistic in its intellectual concerns. It was well positioned to continue to play a strong role in the intellectual life of the University and the profession.
