Don Bialostosky
As I finish my eighth and final year as chair of Pitt’s English department, I can say that I was not mistaken about the reasons this department was worth serving in this capacity. After teaching here for eight years in the wake of an unhappy end to being head of Penn State’s English department, I put my hat in the ring to be chair here because I had come to value my colleagues and to appreciate the way we do our work together. Our deliberations over hiring and policy had impressed me with their candor and collegiality, even when opinions differed strongly, and they have continued to make me grateful and proud as I have convened and led them.
During my years as chair, we have responded to declining enrollments—a national trend—with innovative revisions of our programs—creating a new English literature major, adding a new major in Public and Professional Writing, collaborating on a joint major in Digital Narrative and Interactive Design with Computing and Information Science, adding production and broadcasting tracks to our film major, and adding new courses in digital storytelling in our Writing program.
We have worked together to enhance the diversity of our faculty and student body, hiring six African American colleagues, one Latina colleague, and a colleague who researches the history of transgender children. We’ve created the country’s first Center for African American Poetry and Poetics—perhaps the accomplishment of which I am most proud. Hearing three poets respond to time spent in the studio of sculptor and department alum Thaddeus Mosely was a thrill. Our distinguished alumnus had a wonderful body of work on display in lobby of the Carnegie Museum of Art for this year’s Carnegie International!
In a period of diminished state support when many departments have been unable to replenish their ranks, we’ve hired 20 new tenure-stream colleagues, engaging colleagues of all ranks and graduate students in the best conversations on hiring I have been part of in the five universities where I have participated in them. We have a vital junior faculty, a strong group of mid-rank colleagues, and a growing group of newly appointed full professors who are building on established traditions and striking out in new directions. As members of my cohort finish their careers, they can point with pride to a department they helped to renew by choosing and mentoring new colleagues who are defining the future of our several fields. Were alums of a decade or two to return to take courses now, they would probably not recognize many of the topics and questions in their classes, but I think they would experience the same intellectual excitement and invigorating teaching they cherished in their time here.
We have also increased and strengthened the ranks of our full-time faculty off the tenure stream. We have taken advantage of new opportunities to promote them to higher ranks and been proud to nominate colleagues from among them for prestigious teaching awards. We have benefited enormously from the work they do helping to run our programs and support our students. Our longstanding inclusion of this faculty in departmental governance has been followed during my term by improved recognition and involvement of these faculty members in the Dietrich School and the University.
I’ll be returning to teaching and research after a sabbatical leave. I’m excited to have the opportunity to teach for a semester next year at the University of Lisbon on a Fulbright Fellowship. I’ll be teaching a graduate seminar on the topic of my next book, the poetics of utterance, and an undergraduate course on the poets of Cave Canem, the Black poetry collective co-founded a quarter century ago by Pitt emeritus professor Toi Derricotte.
I’ll be leaving the department in the good hands of Gayle Rogers, from whom you heard in the chair’s column in the last issue of The Fifth Floor. Already a thoughtful leader who has served effectively as Literature program director and associate chair, he will collegially guide the department into the second decade of the twenty-first century. I know it will continue to be a department that warrants our pride and deserves our care and support.
—Don Bialostosky