Letter from the Chair
September 2009
Hello everyone, and welcome to 2009-10; there are some significant challenges and opportunities ahead of us this year.
I’d like to begin by welcoming new faculty to the department. Joining the department at the rank of professor and as director of College Composition is Jim Porter, who comes to us from Michigan State, with a quarter-time joint appointment in Armstrong Interactive Media Studies. Anita Mannur joins us from Denison University as an advanced assistant professor in a joint appointment between English and the new Asian/Asian American Studies program. New visiting faculty, both recruited for our expanding ESL program, are Tony Cimasko and Felice Marcus.
We also welcome the 30 new graduate students in our PhD, MA, and MTSC programs. They are the cream of the crop—the best of 183 applicants who submitted complete files and were reviewed for admission to graduate study in the department this year. Special thanks to director of graduate studies Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson and the graduate admissions committee for their hard work in an unusually busy year for grad admissions.
Three colleagues begin 2009-10 having been newly tenured and promoted: Moira Casey at the Middletown campus, Kelli Johnson at the Hamilton campus (Kelli has also recently been named Associate Dean at Miami-Hamilton), and Brian Roley at Oxford. Please join us in congratulating these three if you haven’t already.
An unusually large number of faculty will be on research leave this year, despite the financial crisis that is forcing retrenchments in other areas. Martha Schoolman will be an external fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities for all of 2009-10, working on her book project on abolitionist geographies. Laura Mandell will be on Assigned Research Appointment for the full year. In addition, in the fall semester, ARA leaves will be taken by Andrew Hebard, Tim Melley, Jason Palmeri, and Kate Ronald. ARA leaves in the spring will be held by Jim Bromley, Susan Morgan, and Patrick Murphy. Alison Hurley will be on personal leave for the year.
You’ll see some more changes in the front office this year. In addition to our new Director of College Composition, please welcome Margaret Luongo, who is beginning her term as Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies. Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson, although not quite new on the job, is entering her second semester as Director of Graduate Studies, along with administrative assistant Sherry Braden who joined us in January. Debbie Morner continues in the vital and recently created position of Assistant to the Chair.
English department faculty are also filling key positions outside the department. LuMing Mao is now the director of the new Asian/Asian American Studies Program, and John Tassoni has taken over as Director of Liberal Education; Mary Jean Corbett continues as director of the new Western Program for Interdisciplinary Studies, and Katie Johnson is assuming a joint appointment with the Western program and English. Madelyn Detloff is beginning her second year as Director of Women’s Studies, and former chair Keith Tuma is entering his second year as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science. Paul Anderson, director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence, will be leading the search for a new director of the Howe Writing Center in King Library, a senior hire with a joint appointment in English. Kate Ronald has moved into her impressive digs in the new Farmer Business School, where she continues to direct the Howe Writing Initiative. Laura Mandell is spearheading a number of digital intiatives on campus, among them a new relationship with Cambridge University Press that gives Miami University exclusive rights to publish a digital rendition of the classic reference work, the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, with Laura in the role of technical editor.
Following up on the renovation last year of the Bachelor Reading Room, the budget crisis notwithstanding, we’ve invested some department resources to equip our largest seminar rooms, Bachelor 341 and 343, with new projectors and interactive white boards that will bring high-tech capability to most of our graduate courses. We have also completed the refurbishing of previously under-utilized 264 Bachelor as a flexible, hard-wired computer lab that will now be an excellent resource for many English classes—take a look inside; you’ll like what you see. BAC 254 has been refitted as a laptop classroom, and for the first time all of our new GAs and TAs are teaching first-year writing in computer classrooms. Most English 111/112 classes this semester—59 of them—are being taught in laptop or hard-wired rooms, thanks to the efforts of Jim Porter along with the Digital Writing Collaborative, coordinated by Heidi McKee and Jason Palmeri. These developments consolidate our position as one of the leaders nationally in the area of digital composition.
As you will recall from the end of spring semester, the dean and provost have approved two faculty searches for the English department, in American modernism and Romantic poetry. This represents a significant opportunity in a year in which the number of authorized searches in the College remains very small indeed. Laura Mandell will chair the search in Romantic poetry, and will be joined on the committee by Mary Jean Corbett and cris cheek. Madelyn Detloff will chair the search in American modernism, working with Stefanie Dunning and Katie Johnson.
This year will also see the inception of our revised undergraduate English major, the result of several years of discussion and effort, and of a new minor in Rhetoric and Writing. The revised majors in literature, creative writing, and linguistics, along with the new minor, will provide our undergraduates with more choice and flexibility in exploring all areas of English, while at the same time removing some of the boundaries that have separated the department’s various programs and limited student traffic between them.
The revision of English 112, funded by Miami’s Top 25 initiative, continues this year as we prepare to offer the newly designed second semester of freshman writing with a number of pilot sections in the spring, accompanied by a streamlined assessment process using Chalk & Wire, the electronic e-portfolio software currently being implemented by the university. In October, the College Composition program will put forward another application for Top 25 support, a grant that would make possible the redesign of English 111 in the next academic year.
Also in College Composition, we have begun redesigning the curriculum in English as a Second Language in order to better serve the rapidly increasing number of international students at Miami. Charm Damon, with funding from the provost’s office, worked all summer on redesigning English 108 and 109, as well laying out our newly approved ESL course for graduate students, English 119. On September 23 and 24 we’ll bring in Paul Matsuda of Arizona State University, our former colleague and now a leading authority in ESL, to consult with us and others across the university invested in the needs of students from abroad. This consultancy, funded by the provost’s office, will help set a course for the future in the department’s and university’s support for international students.
Elsewhere on the international front, LuMing Mao has designed a new Certificate in English for students from abroad who would study for two semesters in our department, pursuing a structured curriculum to enhance their skill in English literature and language. The provost has approved a modified fee schedule for students coming to Miami to enroll in the certificate program beginning next fall, and an agreement has been signed with Shanxi Normal University in China by which as many as 15 of its best English majors would study with us for a year. Other universities in Asia will consider entering into similar relationships with the department in the months just ahead. In the meantime, our proposed annual faculty exchange with Royal Holloway, University of London, is on temporary hold while we try to resolve the differing workload expectations of our department and the English department at RHUL. My visit with the department at Royal Holloway in January was productive, the people there are engaging and very talented (students as well as faculty), and I’m convinced that a relationship with RHUL would serve us well. I’ll continue to explore possibilities this year.
A landmark for the English Department and for the humanities in general at Miami is the establishment at long last of the Miami University Humanities Center, funded by a successful $250,000 grant proposal that Laura Mandell and I put forward last year with Wietse DeBoer in History and Charles Ganelin of Spanish and Portuguese. Katharine Gillespie and Tim Melley have been elected to the steering committee of the Humanities Center, which is up and running now with Allan Winkler of History as the first director and a strong commitment of financial support from entrepreneur and philanthropist John W. Altman. The Humanities Center will be a new and important resource for faculty in English and cognate departments in the humanities, so please keep it in mind as you contemplate research and teaching projects in the months ahead.
The new Humanities Center is one of a number of areas in which I believe the English department can count on continued support from the College and University in this time of budget crisis. I do not foresee, for example, any cuts on the horizon in research leaves or travel funding, and we are fortunate to have two much-needed searches in literature approved and ready to go. Nevertheless, we are in the midst of a severe budget crisis at Miami, and we’ll feel some of the effects of it in English as well as be involved in discussions that bear on the crisis in one way or another. For starters, we will take a significant cut in the money we have available in the department’s operating budget, which pays for a great deal of what matters to us from day to day, from supplies and services to funding for speakers and special events. We have also had to reduce our VAP hiring by a net three positions, cut our part-time hiring, and substantially reduce the number of course sections offered; in these areas of concern, we owe a debt of gratitude to assistant chair Jerry Rosenberg for working long hours through the summer to hold things together and minimize damage to the department. The College is facing accumulating deficits and the need to save on administrative costs by combining or restructuring some academic units where that can be done in a way that makes intellectual sense and creates new opportunities. At the College’s request we will hold a special meeting of the department near the beginning of the term to discuss our own ideas and proposals and offer feedback to Dean Karen Schilling. That urgent meeting will defer until our second faculty meeting the previously announced discussion of the MTSC program and full-scale revision of the department governance document.
As always, an array of guest speakers and special events will be on the calendar for 2009-10. The department will be working on one or more special events to mark the bicentennial of Miami, events in which we will celebrate our past as a department and look forward to new opportunities in the future. Plans for these and other occasions will develop over time, but of special note early in the year is Digital Expo, an exciting event conceived and planned by our own committee on Computers, Research, and Pedagogy in which 25 English department students and faculty will join others from Armstrong Interactive Media Studies and the School of Education, Health, and Society to exhibit their projects in digital media, including scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work. Digital Expo will take place on September 22 from 4 to 8 pm in McGuffey Hall, with Dean Karen Schilling and Dean Carine M. Feyten giving keynote welcome talks. In digital studies, as you know, our department is playing a prominent role not only on campus, but nationally and internationally, so I hope that many of us will turn out for to support our colleagues and students who will be exhibiting. Digital Expo and other special events will be listed and described on the English department website by our webmaster Dana Leonard. Dana greatly enhanced the English website last year, and will continue to enrich content this year with the help of journlism/English intern Lauren Karch—so please visit the site often and offer her your ideas and please keep her informed about your news and accomplishments.
Welcome to all, and best wishes for a happy and productive year!
With warm regards,
Kerry Powell
Professor and Chair of English