1960s Overview
[From the 1969 OWL] For the University of Pittsburgh, the 1960s played out a now familiar narrative of protest and confrontation—and the unrest on campus took place in the context of unpredictable changes in administration.
In 1961, Robert Colodny, Associate Professor of History, was denounced as a communist by the Pittsburgh Press. The publicity produced investigations by the Pennsylvania State Legislature, the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the AAUP. (Chancellor Litchfield defended Colodny and defended the basic principle of academic freedom.)
Throughout the 1960s, the university was struggling to meet its expenses, expenses incurred by Litchfield’s ambitious plans to raise the profile of the institution. According to Robert C. Alberts (Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh, 1787-1987), between 1957 and 1965 Litchfield doubled the size of the faculty and doubled faculty salaries. However, in the face of serious questions concerning the university’s financial stability, in August of 1966 the administration negotiated an agreement with Harrisburg that brought financial assistance in return for Pitt’s new status as a “state-related” institution. Some assumed that this would bring in large numbers of poorly prepared students and drive away newly recruited senior faculty.
In 1965, Litchfield had a heart attack. With his health in question and the financial crisis before him, he resigned his position. (He would die in a plane crash in 1968.) Litchfield was followed by Stanton Crawford, the University’s 13th Chancellor, and David Kurtzman, the 14th, each serving for only one year. (When Crawford died of a heart attack, Kurtzman was named Acting Chancellor. He was then named Chancellor to span the gap until the arrival of Wesley Posvar.)
In June, 1967, Wesley Posvar became the University’s 15th Chancellor. In January, 1969, the Black Action society occupied his office. In February, 1969, 800 students and faculty staged a demonstration in the Commons Room demanding, among other things, free speech, the removal of ROTC from campus, a revised curriculum, new forms of assessment, freedom from surveillance, and increased attention to the rights of women and minorities. In March of 1969, 350 students and faculty again occupied the Commons Room of the Cathedral, this time for three days.
The English department occupied all sides of every debate. In retrospect, however, the most important and decisive thing to note about the English department in the 1960s was the striking growth of the graduate program. In the 1940s, the English department granted 21 PhDs; in the 1950s, 26; and in the 1960s, 89. This growth was planned and supported by new faculty lines, including Mellon Professorships, and by new Mellon fellowships for graduate students. It was part of a push to raise the research profile of the department (and the institution). Since the 1920s, the department had defined itself in terms of teaching and service. Now it had to begin to think differently.
Rather than write an extended overview, we thought it would be appropriate to invite memories from colleagues who were there, part of the department in the 1960s.
[From the 1969 OWL]
From Robert Gale
With Dartmouth BA and Columbia MA and PhD, I was hired by London-born Dr. George Crouch, English department chairman, after an MLA interview in New York. My family and I arrived August 1959. Welcoming me were Charles Crow (Shakespeare), Montgomery Culver (writing), Ford Curtis (drama), Arthur Fidele (Irish literature; associate of Charles Peake), Emily Irvine (literature), Putnam Jones (dean), Lawrence Lee (poetry), Abe Laufe (American drama; Peterson’s associate), Edward Litchfield (brilliant, highly sociable chancellor; his wife loved mine), Ed Peterson (composition), Richard Tobias (Victorian), Donald Tritschler (American), and Ralph Ware (American). Slight trouble started, and persisted a while: I learned through Crow that though he admired me sufficiently, Crouch hadn’t consulted anyone before hiring me (starting pay $5,700). Ware died in 1961. Crouch needed another Americanist, soon hired Tom Philbrick (1963?). The relatively small department socialized well, had cocktail parties, picnics, Christmas parties. There was probably too much drinking. In due time, my wife helped newcomers find housing. WWII veterans in the department were Evert, Fidele, Laufe, Lee, Markman, Tobias, Whitman, and my wife and I. Department divorces shook social amiability somewhat.
Crouch was notorious for saving Pitt money, not helping us get substantial raises. He hired Jim Simmonds (17th century), uniquely paid him a year when he was stuck back in Australia. Later 1960s chairmen were Fred Mayer (1966-1967) and Bob Whitman (from 1967; drama). Mayer hired Jim Knapp (1966). Frank Wadsworth, dean, domineered the department; Mayer couldn’t even quote salary to Knapp. Wadsworth brought Walt Evert (Romanticist, Bible; associate dean). Whitman hired Marcia Landy (Milton, film), Cynthia Matlack (18th century), Chris Rawson (drama), Bill Searle (American); Ray Lee Siporin; Whitman was sometimes speedy, asking little committee input. During Whitman’s absence, to accompany his wife to Washington, D.C., Evert was acting chairman.
A big feature of the 1960s was the requirement that each MA candidate had to write a thesis. I directed 23. It was soon thought such thesis writing cost too great a percentage of student time. I was asked to introduce new American lit courses, initiated (1960s and later) Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, and Naturalism seminars, and undergraduate courses in Civil War lit, Roaring Twenties lit, and Western lit. When Philbrick asked me if he could take over my Melville seminar, I agreed courteously. He knew sea fiction better than I did. Whitman made me the department’s first graduate studies director (1967-1973), with no secretary and no committee. I made decisions on applicants, sent recommendations to Evert (Wadsworth’s assistant dean); he usually agreed, sometimes over-rode rationally. The best of the 39 students whose PhD dissertations I directed, starting in the 1960s, were Ronald Emerick (Indiana PA), Edward Grejda (late of Clarion), Raj Kumar Gupta (India), James Haines (Point Park), Granville Jones (late of CMU), Fred Koloc (late of Pitt), Janet McCann (Texas A&M), Bob Papinchak (didn’t get tenure and went to Boise State), Irving Rothman (Houston), and James Watson (late of Tulsa).
From Richard Tobias
When we first heard about the Mellon professorships, I sat through weary sessions of faculty complaint. Probably no one in English was earning more than $7000 or $8000. One of the Americanists said to Mrs. Sheedy as he came for his monthly check, “Well, where is the latest insult?” The Mellon professors were to receive $20,000. “Why doesn’t the foundation give the money to the University so that we could all get better salaries?” When we found out that the English Department would have a Mellon chair, no one moved a muscle. Crouch wrote a letter to Lionel Trilling, but the $20,000 over his $18,000 (and an apartment) at Columbia was not sufficient to intrigue him.
[From the 1969 OWL] Probably the old Pitt faculty feared new, strong appointments as well as new ideas. Lionel Knights came because Charles Crow was the only person that Knights would compete with. At Ohio State, I could read a book by one faculty member and find ideas that I knew originated in three or four others. Pitt faculty –except for Charles Crow and Alan Markman—never talked to one another or to me. They had nothing to say, I suspect. I always thought that Charles Peake had been the responsible party for selecting and persuading L. C. Knights to come. British scholars were available because their salaries were even lower than in the U.S. The British scholars talked to us, they were all more alert than the Old Pitt faculty, and they brought fresh perspectives. They made a difference. In addition to Knights we had … Kenneth Muir (Shakespearean), and the wonderful Will Matthews (a medievalist). Matthews had a wee touch of cockney still in his speech, and he could speak wonderfully about allowing or not allowing Black students to use their own language.
In my first year, I had met members of the Old Pitt philosophy department at lunch on the 17th floor. One was a heavy, profound German gentleman who resembled Immanuel Kant. He was a Lutheran, and he let it be known. Another was a skinny, wispy man who talked to me about poetry. He absolutely proclaimed that Aesthetics was not a division of philosophy. There was a serious man who always wore a shaded baseball cap because his eyes hurt. Except for the heavy Lutheran who was just short of retirement, they all disappeared, and the new crew that Charles Peake recruited at Yale came in. Mellon professorships altered the moribund department.
I am sure that the Old Pitt faculty thought that they too would lose cachet as unceremoniously as the Old Philosophy people. In those days, it was still possible to locate at a more congenial place. The sweet gentlemen went to places where other sweet gentlemen could be found. Charles Peake was the Power. I don’t know what his title was, but later the position would be defined as the Provost. Charles was an English professor who had passed into administration at the University of Michigan. Alan Markman had known him at Michigan, and Alan’s position in the department (and quick promotion to associate professor with tenure) might have been a hope for the department to keep control of [its] own destiny. Alan had invitations to Chancellor Litchfield’s country estate in northern central Pennsylvania. Charles Peake would turn up at Markman parties. We also knew a young man, Bernard Schroeder Adams, who Litchfield had hired as the first Head of Admissions. University spaces were still limited after the post-war glut, and the Registrar could make a simple decision. Adams was the son of a professor at Franklin and Marshall College, and Bernie’s baby-sitter had been Richard D. Altick, my professor at Ohio State. Bernie was a Princeton graduate (and basketball star) who had worked in Princeton’s admission office. Bernie enrolled in our graduate program and earned a degree while running admissions. He sat at Litchfield’s cabinet meetings and relayed judgments, plans, proposals to Alan Markman and others in the revolutionary group. “Charles Peake will get a Mellon professor; Charles Peake will reform this antiquated curriculum.”
[From the 1969 OWL] Peake was the instrument that brought the Philosophy department in to the second half of the twentieth century, but he never could succeed with English. When Frank Wadsworth came as Faculty of Arts & Sciences Dean, he may also have secured some of these men for us. The earlier Brit, Herbert Howarth, might have been a young candidate for a Mellon appointment, but Howarth had only a temporary visa. Howarth went to Canada to re-enter in two years on a permanent visa, but at the end of two years Penn wooed him away from us. He died shortly after. Knights came several times and he was a wonderful faculty member – witty, kind, knowledgeable, and so very encouraging of conversation. Several of us went to lunch with him, and Knights came to our houses to talk about I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis at Cambridge. He had been I.A. Richards’ student at Cambridge and had written examples in Richards’ Practical Criticism. He had published early reviews of Eliot’s work! I admired his work on Ben Jonson. He was a Scrutiny stalwart. When I made a slightly disparaging comment about Leavis’ moralism, Knights turned to correct me—not about the moralism but about Leavis’ strong influence on him and other scholars at Cambridge. Knights was thin as a rail, and he had wonderful stories about being rejected for the British army during World War II and saddled with humongous teaching loads, air raid station duties, and care for the sick and wounded. He spoke at an angle to every expected judgment. He was always an heroic ideal of what a professor should be. I found him coming out of our Book Centre with a stack of newly-purchased books. “Professor Knights, books are cheaper in England!” “Yes,” he responded, “but there I don’t have the money to buy books.” We arranged for him to meet Robert Frost when Frost came to receive an honorary degree. Knights was very excited, “He is almost as good, you know, as Yeats.” Well, yes. He didn’t mind American actors performing Shakespeare, and he declared every new production and every new reading opened up new ideas for him. When I last talked to him in 1994, he was excited about a new book on Hamlet. He fixed my lunch and we talked so happily for several hours. I probably tired him too much, but the talk was so good.
Students would start projects in seminars, and then Knights would disappear back to Bristol and then later back to Cambridge where he was named King Edward VII Professor of English literature. He always announced, “A political appointment, you know; no merit in it all.” His influence probably brought Kenneth Muir for a visit since they both had been concerned with Labour Politics….
L.C. Knights lived until 8 March 1995. He was always willing to host visiting Pitt faculty in England. He was always a name we could use to open doors for us while we worked in England. He had a son, Ben, who later earned a Ph.D. at Cambridge (his father had only an M.A.) and published a book on Coleridge’s idea of the clerisy as it worked out in Carlyle, Arnold, Newman, and Pater (I’m unsure about the last). Ben was still in his teens at Knights’ first visit, but he did not attend an American school for fear that it would damage his chances to enter Cambridge. Instead he read –chiefly about the American Civil War. My memory of young Ben is his jumping. He bounced like a ball. The Knights had also adopted a daughter, Frances, who was the child of Mrs. Knights’ sister. Mrs. Knights taught at the College of Education in Cambridge (Homerton), and we called her, behind her back, the Duchess. She had furious stories about how Cambridge ignored her and only thought of Lionel. Her father had survived the Battle of Gallipoli during WWI, and in the 1960s was still alive. Mrs. Knights, however, slipped into senility in the 1980s. Surely she has passed to her great reward. Ben Knights married a faculty member at Durham University, but I never managed to see him on my visits to England. I have not seen any books beyond that first one. His father explained that he worked primarily with non-traditional students at Durham. His father also said that Ben worked to undo all that he had done as a critic. Other times, other manners.
On his first visit, Knights came with such a passion against Northrop Frye that he wouldn’t allow any of the words from The Anatomy of Criticism in his classes. A few wiser students derived the terms through William Blake (where Frye had them too) and thus managed to get Frye’s critical ideas into the seminar. Knights approved of William Blake. Knights discovered later that Frye attended Knights’ lectures in Cambridge and thus the resistance to Frye melted. Knights’ last visit to Pittsburgh was the spring of 1977 when he gave a lecture on Eliot’s Four Quartets for the Northeast MLA.
The visitors stimulated us, brought us fresh ideas, questioned our old ideas, but they didn’t stay long enough to produce that quality and quantity of graduates that the Pitt Philosophy department turned out with great and astonishing regularity.
[From the 1969 OWL]
From James F. Knapp
When I joined the department in the mid-sixties, students and faculty were passionate about the civil rights and environmental movements, and then increasingly about ending the war in Viet Nam. Organizing protests against the war still overshadowed the new feminism, which would not fully announce its presence until the founding of the Women’s Studies Program in 1972. In the early sixties, the English faculty was small-- just 24 men and one woman. The graduate program, on the other hand, was large, with 215 graduate students, though perhaps as a hint of changing times, 49% were women. Nevertheless, the department’s reading list for M.A. students preparing for the final examination was firmly traditional: “We recommend only the following as major figures.” The list that followed specified 51 names, including the undoubtedly lonely voice of just one woman, Emily Dickinson. Course readings in the department were already far more diverse, but the canon wars were still ahead of us, while the initial energies for change in the department tended to focus on a broad range of pedagogical issues.
At first, there were individual experiments. Bob Marshall (then assistant professor, later Dean of the College) and I both taught sections of Early Masterpieces to 120 students, without any TA support, which we thought was a terrible way to encourage student involvement in their own education. So we decided to take things into our own hands, dropping some lectures and dividing the class into small groups for two-hour discussions, all of which we would teach ourselves. In some weeks we would each teach 8 of these two-hour sessions. Earnest and hopeful, but impossible to sustain, our experiment was one moment in a much more general search among the faculty to find new ways of enhancing the learning of our undergraduates. A variety of initiatives began to emerge, many hard to imagine today. One group of faculty decided they could teach their students more fully if they understand better “the subtleties and complexities of group activity,” and so they convinced the Dean to give them a small grant to hire a psychoanalyst, who would meet with them regularly at someone’s house. Dr. Wodnicki was knowledgeable about film and art, as well as psychoanalysis, and he remained a friend of the department for many years.
[From the 1969 OWL] Far more general in its scope, was the department’s Undergraduate Policies Committee, which met for several years to rethink all the fundamental assumptions about how undergraduates were being taught. In 1969, the committee made its formal proposal to the department, and its premises truly capture the hopes and beliefs of its decade, urging that: “Teaching and learning (like scholarship) occur most rewardingly in an atmosphere of maximum freedom, honesty, trust, and community; that education occurs when real emotional and intellectual needs are being recognized and satisfied; that pedagogical policies should be designed to encourage and inspire rather than to force and punish; that the unfettered quest for knowledge and involvement in ideas and feeling are seductive in their own right and may be counted on to arouse the enthusiasm of young men and women eager to steep themselves in life and art; that our task is to facilitate growth not to issue certification.”
Taking its own premises seriously, the Undergraduate Policies Committee proposed that the catalog would not list any regular courses; that teachers and students would decide what they wanted to pursue and how the group would operate; there would be no required courses and no minimum courses expected of an undergraduate major; there would be no grades and no requirements such as exams or papers “except insofar as a whole group agrees to certain self-regulating disciplines.” The proposal concludes, “At the end of the year the same number of credits goes to the student who has been involved in three contracts or one or none. In effect, the student receives his B.A. for having declared himself a literature major—no more and no less.” Not surprisingly, the proposal failed to pass, but only after many long and heated meetings. The details may have been hopelessly utopian, but at the proposal’s heart was a striking expression of the belief that every student wants to learn, that free inquiry should be the heart of the university, that our task as teachers is to enable the education of the whole person.
The Undergraduate Policies Committee provided departmental drama at the end of the decade, but the issues it took up were being debated across the department (and in departments across the country). The creative writing program decided to leave the choice of literature courses up to its students, but they also voted to retain their separate identity as a program. Although there was as yet no formal composition program, the Freshman English Committee in the same year proposed that the requirement for Freshman English be abolished, and by the early 70’s there were no required courses in English. Some of those requirements would be reinstated in the decades to come, but the in the spring of 1969 the Freshman English Committee concluded that that “there must be a university-wide focus on the need for developing communications skills—a focus that will cause students, no matter what their major areas of study, to be making constant re-evaluation of such needs throughout their undergraduate courses.” Forty years later, writing across the curriculum was a responsibility accepted by every department in the Dietrich School. Some ideas launched in the sixties, such as that one, are now taken for granted; some remain only as cultural history. It was a memorable decade.
From Marcia Landy
[From the 1969 OWL] I was hired as an Assistant Professor in the tenure stream in 1967-68 by then Department Chair, Robert Whitman. I was to fill the position of a “Miltonist,” and I was to teach general introductory courses in poetry and the novel. I was one of several new appointments in English. My hiring was not exceptional, but for the fact that I was one of only a very few women in the tenure stream.
I suspect that the decision to hire me was in part related to the development of a new professional journal, Milton Studies, to be edited by Professor James Simmonds. This journal was to become a major resource for Seventeenth Century scholars (and would continue long after Professor Simmonds retired through the able editorship of Albert Labriola at Duquesne University). It seemed to me that the department was in a growth mode. I joined other new faculty: Alexander Welsh, a Victorianist from Yale, and another, also from Yale, Philip Wion in Shakespeare Studies; Barrett Mandell, an advocate of radical forms of teaching Composition and Literature; Rae Siporin in Linguistics; and a few other hires in American and English literature.
The department continued to grow into the early 1970s. Initially, the department was conservative, adhering to established methods of scholarship and teaching, but this was to change. I should underline that the department that I entered was an impressive and solid intellectual environment with an enviable faculty. My personal predilections were for Professor Whitman, who was a George Bernard Shaw and drama scholar, Professor Thomas Philbrick, a scholar of the first order in American Literature, and a phenomenal classroom teacher, and Charles Crow, another formidable teacher.
Department meetings became increasingly lively in the next decade as a forum for discussing changes in the curriculum, in teaching methodologies, and in criteria for promotion. In the next decades, the department was to move into a prominent position in the university and in the profession, through the efforts of faculty to sponsor departmental and interdepartmental programs, including first-class Composition and Film Studies Programs, as well as supporting programs in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies.
From Chris Rawson
Hired by Bob Whitman in 1967, I joined the department in 1968, straight from a year of bibliographic and textual work at the British Museum, anticipating a traditional career of genteel research. But remember 1968? Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, battles over equal opportunity in housing and jobs? I was thrown into the tumult of civic politics and policy, which extended right into what, how, why and whom we were teaching. I was so bedazzled that it took me a couple of years to write the last few chapters of my dissertation.
For me, the center of these questions was a lively discussion group formed by Bob Marshall in which 10 or 12 of us younger faculty (both assistant and associate professors) debated all the dynamic aspects of teaching that had been absent from my otherwise pleasant graduate training. (This is the group that in a subsequent year met with Dr. Wodnicki about group interaction.)
Pitt was bulking up for the baby boom; so was the department; those were yeasty times. We younger hires lay siege to and overcame the requirement for lit majors of six period survey courses. Freed from teaching the 18th century survey every term, I invented a Satire course that had students singing Monty Python’s “Philosophers’ Song.” We explored small classes, big classes, team-teaching, any variant possible. Phil Wion and I even taught a 200-student, double-credit survey course, Beowulf to Blake, with every small-and-large-group bell and whistle we could dream up. We also took university courses out into the community, which had me teaching on-site seminars for teachers in several high schools, using just about anything they’d agree to read with the covert goal of getting them to actually talk to each other about education.
[From the 1969 OWL]
Amid all the excitement and the alarums of battle, there were doubtless losses. In my first year, we could have all 25 tenure-stream department members to a party, and did. A couple of years later, the department was too big – but there were too many battle scars to make such a party attractive, anyway. Some of us younger faculty lost relations with senior people we admired. Differences in principle too quickly became personal.
In retrospect, maybe we were reinventing the wheel. But anyway, we didn’t win: a department where the dominant (in numbers and energy) younger faculty was in love with innovation, teaching and service, was soon reined in and returned to the conventional research model by a powerful Dean. I was the first casualty, denied tenure by the Dean for the same record heavy in teaching and service that had been sufficient the year before.
On the other hand, some of what we advocated soon became common place. So even when you lose, time is on your side. Flash forward a few decades and the English Department has sprouted out in all directions, an inspiring mix of programs. As for me, the national AAUP said I had de facto tenure. So although I developed a parallel, 25-year career as theater critic, I never left Pitt, and now (2014) I’m just a couple of years short of a half-century teaching at this place I love in spite of itself.
1960s Courses
By all accounts, life in the English department in the 1960s was exciting, dynamic, noisy, contentious, and difficult. It was a decade of transition between a department formed in the 1920s, a department that defined itself primarily in terms of teaching and service, reading and writing (small r, small w), and the department that was to emerge in the 1970s, a department with ambitions to national prominence in research and publication. The figures, energies, and administrative structures to emerge in the 1970s created a department that led the nation in rethinking the terms, methods, and reach of English Studies. But it was not an easy transition.
Literature
In the 1960s, the graduate program grew dramatically. In the 1950s, the department granted 26 PhDs; in the 1960s it granted 89. The number of MA candidates increased at almost the same rate, by a factor of 2 rather than 3. The PhD program, as it always had been, was a program of fairly conventional literary study—period, author, and genre. With the emphasis turning to the PhD program, the study of literature became the center of growth, energy and visibility in the department. And with the large numbers of graduate teaching assistants that were added to the lower division teaching pool, the study of literature became the frame of reference for general education (including the teaching of composition) in ways (and to a degree) that were markedly different from the past.
This growth in the graduate program was planned, part of a campus initiative that began in 1956 when Edward Litchfield took office as the University’s 12th Chancellor. It began to shape the department in 1959, when the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust gave $12 million to the University to establish ten distinguished professorships and 50 pre-doctoral fellowships. English was one of the 10 departments chosen to receive these funds and, it was assumed, to develop a significant research profile and a distinguished graduate program. Philosophy, with the appointment of Adolph Grunbaum as its Mellon Chair, would lead the way. (It is worth remembering that Charles Peake, a Professor of English, was Assistant Chancellor, soon to be Vice Chancellor for the Academic Disciplines. Putnam Jones, a Professor of English, was Dean of the Graduate School. And Frank Wadsworth, a Professor of English, would be hired in 1962 to serve as the Dean of the Division of the Humanities.)
The growth in the graduate program was part of a growth across U.S. universities, prompted in part by demographic predictions of a need for college faculty, in part by the war in Vietnam and students seeking draft exemptions, but primarily (at least at the University of Pittsburgh) by the generation of men and women who entered the profession after the war and who wanted a professional status that came with research, advanced study, and engagement with a PhD program. In a 1964 report invited by the Dean’s office, the department projected annual graduate student enrollments to more than double between 1962 and 1970:
Full Time MA/PhD from 47 in 1962 to an estimated 118 in 1970
Part Time MA/PhD from 98 in 1962 to an estimated 159 in 1970
Full Time PhD from 2 in 1962 to an estimated 56 in 1970
Part Time PhD from 32 in 1962 to an estimated 96 in 1970.
In a 1971 report to the department by Robert Gale, Director of Graduate Studies, the primary PhD research areas for the decade of the 1960s were:
Old English, Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (dissertations from a total of 89)
American Literature, 1900 to the present 20
Eighteenth Century British 10
American Literature, 1860-1900 8
Criticism 8
American Literature to 1860 7
And it appears that the PhD graduates in the 60s were successful in finding tenure track positions, many at local colleges, including the University of Pittsburgh’s regional campuses, but one third of them at major research universities across the US. In the PhD class of the 1960s, there would be 16 English department chairs, 4 college presidents, 3 Provosts or Deans, several endowed chairs, and an MLA James Russell Lowell Award winner.
The hiring to support the graduate program in English, and the very substantial number of graduate students who joined the department (and who wanted to bring literature into the composition course) gave new weight and definition to the teaching and study of Literature. There was an increase in the number and range of literature courses in the course catalogs of the 1960s, and the newer courses went beyond the usual period designations to include: “The Roaring 20s,” “The Augustans,” “Metaphysicals and Cavaliers,” “Makers of Modern Drama,” “Milton,” “Contemporary British Novelists,” and “The American Renaissance.” The reading list for the PhD Comprehensive Exam, a much contested document, assumed coverage of the broad canon in English and American literature. More than anything else, the growth of the graduate program changed the department’s sense of its mission and identity. [add pdf to PhD Comp Exam]
Creative Writing
From 1920 to 1960, the English department defined itself by highlighting the success of the undergraduates who learned to write in its classes. In the 1960s, the Writing Major remained a popular choice among undergraduates. But during the decade of the 60s, the Creative Writing program began to lose its momentum. With the retirements of Edwin Peterson and Emily Irvine creative writing would lose two of its most effective teachers and, in Peterson, a much heralded, much admired public figure. Lawrence Lee, who had the strongest national reputation as a writer, and who might have been expected to step forward, turned his back on the program and insisted on teaching courses in literature.
In 1964 Peterson wrote a letter to George Crouch, responding to a request for a report on the status of the Writing Major. Peterson wrote reluctantly and said that after almost 20 years of success,
a change set in, not suddenly but almost imperceptibly. An excellent young teacher, George Abbe, who has since done very well for himself, became an understandable embarrassment to the University and was relieved of his duties. Mr. Lawrence Lee was employed in his place and after a number of years Professor Lee, for many reasons resigned from our program. Later, Miss Dorothy O’Connor, one of our more talented teachers, left the University to be married. Professor Crow, who had kindly consented to help in our work, became so deeply involved in graduate teaching that he could no longer assist us. In 1962 Dr. Laufe gave up his course in article writing to assist in the freshman program. In 1963, Miss Emily Irvine, a substantial and invaluable part of our program, retired. And back in 1961, I myself had to give up two courses in advanced writing to take care of a new system of teaching Freshmen English with graduate assistant as instructors.
In the end, he said, the writing major had 1½ teachers “trying to take care of about one third of all the majors registered in the English department.” And, he concluded: “Obviously the quality of the program has deteriorated.”
Montgomery (Monty) Culver, who emerged as the available senior figure in the Writing Program after Peterson’s retirement, did not have the personality to fight the battles for faculty resources or to propose an MFA, a move that would have tied the writing program to the growth in graduate studies. (The Writers Workshop at Iowa could have provided the model.) The Writing Program would struggle for recognition and for faculty resources until Ed Ochester took over as program Director in 1978.
Composition
The story of Composition in the 1960s is a story of a transition in leadership, from Edwin Peterson to Virginia Elliott. From the time he joined the faculty in the 1930s, Peterson was at the center of both composition and writing in the undergraduate curriculum. In the 40s and 50s, these areas of writing became more finely differentiated. The value of “creative” writing became increasingly measured in terms of publication and awards, recognition from the outside rather than the value to the student writer. And composition was increasingly understood in relation to the demands of administering a required course to thousands of students. In the 1960s, Peterson gained national attention for creating a composition course, the “magic lantern” course delivered to hundreds of students in a lecture hall. This was far removed from his famous conference courses in the Early American nationality room. Developing this course moved Peterson away from the Writing major and back more fully into first year composition.
By the time Peterson retired in 1968, the composition course he represented was meeting substantial opposition from faculty colleagues, who would refer disparagingly to the “Pittsburgh Paragraph,” but even more so from the now very large cohort of graduate teaching assistants, students in the 60s who saw the course as old-fashioned, rigid, and formulaic, more of an “exercise to be endured” than a course for the new generation, as argued in a long report from a committee chaired by Charles Crow.
Robert Whitman, the department chair, needed to prepare for the transition. He recruited Virginia Elliott from the School of Education to join the department in 1967 as a Lecturer. Her assignment would be to direct the Composition Program—to write the curriculum, to train the graduate assistants, and to coordinate the instructors who taught composition. Elliott had been teaching and supervising student teachers in the School of Education since 1965. Before that, she taught English at Mt. Lebanon High School (from 1940 to 1965). In the 40s, she had taken courses in the English department, courses in Short Story and Advanced Short Story, most likely with Peterson, and she had published two stories in Prairie Schooner. Elliott was active with the NCTE and, in 1969, with Lois Josephs Fowler (a former Pitt PhD student, now at CMU), she edited and provided a chapter for English for Academically Advanced Students (NCTE, 1969).
With no one in the English department prepared to step forward to run the program, Whitman turned to Elliott. (Abe Laufe, who had worked on the “magic lantern” course, would have been an obvious choice, but Laufe was to retire in 1971.) For the English department, Elliott taught composition, children’s literature, and a teaching seminar for graduate assistants, English 285, first called “Teaching Composition in College” and later “Rhetoric.” She rewrote the required first year course (we have from two versions of this – “A Basic Course in Freshman Composition” and “Freshman English”), and she began to explore a computer-assisted course for remedial students. [add pdfs at class names]
In 1970 Elliott was promoted to Associate Professor but, to her disappointment, her primary appointment remained in the School of Education. She felt she had earned her status as a member of the English department; she felt this had been part of the deal when she was first hired. She retired a few years later, when William E. Coles, Jr. was recruited to become the new Director of Composition. Coles would once again bring the department’s composition program to national prominence.
For more on Edwin Peterson, composition, and creative writing, see this conversation between David Bartholomae and Andrew Welsh. [add pdf]
1960s Faculty
Visiting Mellon Professors
In 1959, the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust gave $12 million to the University to establish ten distinguished professorships and 50 pre-doctoral fellowships. The English department was named as a recipient. In the 1960s, the department used the funds to bring in Visiting Mellon Professors. All were invited to teach graduate seminars, courses for undergraduates, and to present lectures to the university community. In the 1960s, the Visiting Mellon Professors were:
[L.C. Knights]
L.C. Knights (1961/1962). Knights was the Winterstoke Professor of English at Bristol University, England, and later the King Edward VII Professor of English literature at Cambridge (1965-1973). He was an editor of Scrutiny and a distinguished critic and scholar. In the 1960s, he published An Approach to Hamlet (Stanford, 1961), Shakespeare: The Histories (Longmans, 1965), and Further Explorations (Stanford, 1965). In 1976, he published Explorations 3 with the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Kenneth Muir (1962/1963; 1963/1964). Muir was the King Alfred Professor of English Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Liverpool. Like Knights, he was a distinguished scholar of the English renaissance. Muir provided an essay for the Charles Crow festschrift, Shakespeare’s Late Plays (1974).
Allardyce Nicoll (1964/65; Spring 1966). Nicoll was a drama historian at Birmingham University, director of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford, and editor of Shakespeare Survey.
James R. Sutherland (1965/66). Sutherland was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, University of London. He worked on English literature of the 17th and 18th centuries.
L.C. Knights returned as a Visiting Mellon Professor in 1966/67. Knights provided an essay for the Charles Crow festschrift, Shakespeare’s Late Plays (1974).
[William Matthews]
William Matthews (1967/1968). Matthews was Professor of English at UCLA, Director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the principal editor of the definitive edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys.
John Crow (1968/1969?) From Richard Tobias: “We also had one term, a visiting scholar from Britain, John Crow, a remarkable man who was interested in Shakespeare, boxers, and cooking. At one faculty meeting, the two Crow gentlemen [John Crow and Charles Crow] were sitting side by side so that I could shout to the medievalist, Markman, “Look, the Twa Corbies.” One seldom gets to play such a hand.”
Warner G. Rice (1969/1970). Rice was Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He was formerly the Director of the University Library and Chair of the Michigan English department. Rice was a distinguished Miltonist and was on campus at the time of the founding of Milton Studies.
Retirements, Faculty of Long Standing
Ford Elmore Curtis, Professor. Curtis retired in 1960. With his wife, he had created an extensive collection of theater playbills, reviews, photographs, clippings and memorabilia documenting the history of theater in New York and Pittsburgh from the 1840s to the 1960s. The Ford E. and Harriet R. Curtis Theatre Collection is now housed at the Hillman Library.
Emily Gertrude Irvine, Professor. Irvine retired in 1964. She was the first to teach children’s literature in our department. Her writing courses were legendary and many of her students won national awards for work they did under her supervision.
Agnes Lynch Starrett, Professor. Starrett retired in 1964 and the alumni magazine, which she had once edited, published a long tribute to her “Four Decades with Pitt.” She joined the department in 1924, after completing her MA and studying with Percival Hunt. She was closely involved with university publications throughout her career, and she was the author of the first comprehensive history of the University, Through One Hundred and Fifty Years (1937). In 1954 she was named the Director of the University of Pittsburgh Press; in 1955 she was promoted to the rank of Professor. For most of her career, she taught courses in composition.
[Avery Bernhard reporting from the front]
Marjorie Avery Bernhard, Associate Professor. Bernhard retired in 1965. She was one of the few American women journalists to report from overseas during World War II. She taught journalism and magazine writing.
Frederick Philip Mayer, Professor. Mayer chaired the English department in the 1940s and served an important role as a senior member of the faculty through the 50s. When George Crouch stepped down as department Chair in 1966, Mayer served for a year as Acting Chair. He retired in 1968. Robert F. Whitman assumed the role of department chair in 1967.
Edwin L. Peterson, Professor. In 1960, Peterson served as a visiting professor and Director of the Short Story Program at the University of Colorado. In 1962 he won a Distinguished Service to Journalism award from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania. He retired in 1968.
Throughout his tenure in the 1960s, however, he continued to play a major role in support of composition and creative writing, and he continued to be much in the national news. Peterson was known for the success of the writers who passed through his workshops, intense and heated meetings in the Early American classroom which served as his office. In the early 1960s, however, Peterson began to teach composition through large lectures, 200 students at a time, assisted by a “magic lantern,” an overhead projector.
He developed transparencies and overlays to present writing samples and then to highlight features for discussion. The slides included student themes, which he would edit with a grease pencil. With a projected image, large numbers of students could read, discuss, and edit the same text at the same time. Peterson said, “I have to see a manuscript to tell whether it is any good. Yet for all these years, writing teachers—myself included—have been trying to tell students about writing. It is no wonder it hasn’t worked.”
This project brought new national attention to the department. In 1962, Peterson won a $23,000 grant from the U.S. Office of Education to adapt this new system for use across U.S. university campuses. In 1963, the system was published and marketed nationally by Science Research Associates, in Chicago, along with a new textbook, Contemporary Composition, co-authored with Robert Lumsden from the Evanston Township High School and Northwestern University. The “magic lantern” course was presented at a special session of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. [add pdf to Contemporary Composition]
Peterson retired after 41 years of teaching. He had joined the faculty as a graduate assistant in 1927. To honor his retirement, the alumni magazine asked Peterson to “roll a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter and put down whatever random thought came to him, reflecting on almost a half century of helping young men and women express their own thoughts. This was published under the title, “Why Don’t Students See Orion?” In style and thought, the essay is very much in line with Percival Hunt’s The Gift of the Unicorn.” Peterson’s comments are presented by short, numbered, aphoristic sections, called “Notions.” Notion #1 reads:
Often I am shocked to realize that many of my students never see the heavens. They live in cities or in heavily populated suburbs, and the streetlights blind them to the stars. Mention Orion to most students, and they look at you in bewilderment. They have read about the Great Dipper, some of them, but they have never lain on the top of a hill and watched the constellation move about the North Star. Strange world that wants to put a man on the moon but that cannot look at the stars!
Professors
W. George Crouch, Professor. Crouch continued to serve as department chair through 1965-66, when he was appointed Secretary of the University and Secretary of the Board of Trustees.
Putnam Fennell Jones, Professor. Jones served as Dean of the Graduate School. Robert Alberts, in his history of the university, quotes Jones in 1962 giving this assessment of the Litchfield era: “The trouble at Pitt has been that, until a few years ago, Pitt was just about cut off from the scholarly world where reputations are made. The big change is that Pitt has now joined the scholarly world.”
Charles H. Peake, Professor. In 1961 Peake’s title changed from Assistant Chancellor for Student Affairs to Vice Chancellor for the Academic Disciplines. Peake was one of three Vice Chancellors; the others were Vice Chancellor for the Professions and Vice Chancellor for Finance. In 1968, Peake was appointed Provost, which meant that he was in charge of all academic units except the Health Professions. During his tenure as Vice Chancellor and Provost, Peake guided most of the senior appointments during the Litchfield administration and played a role in the institution’s growth in stature as a center for research. It was Peake, for example, who led the recruitment that brought Adolf Grunbaum as the Mellon Professor of Philosophy.
[Robert Whitman] Robert F. Whitman (PhD, Harvard 1956). Robert Whitman joined the department as an Assistant Professor in 1960. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1966 and Professor in 1967, when he was also appointed English department Chair. Whitman’s specialty was drama. He published articles on Shelley (The Cenci), O’Neill, Webster, and Shaw. He was the author of three books: The Play-Reader’s Handbook (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); Beyond Melancholy: John Webster and the Tragedy of Darkness (Salzburg, Inst. Fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1973), and Shaw and the Play of Ideas (Cornell, 1977).
Lawrence Lee, Professor. In 1963, Lee published “The Present Status of Tragedy” in the journal, The Classical World (May 1963). In the decade of the 1960s, Lee also published three books of verse, two with Boxwood, a small press located in Pittsburgh and edited by Ralph Buchsbaum, Professor of Zoology at the university: The American as Faust: A Dramatic Poem (Boxwood, 1965); The Voice of the Furies (Boxwood, 1969); and The Cretan Flute and Other Poems (Dolmen Press, 1968). Lee also edited a collection of poetry, some written by current and former students, Cathedral Poets I (Boxwood, 1966). In 1976, his poem The Cathedral, hand carved in slate, was mounted on the wall of the Cathedral of Learning commons room, near room 123. The poem was commissioned by Pitt’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and written in 1966. Here is its opening stanza:
Through night its shape
Was darkness lifting from restraining dark
A spire of stillness in a fixed sleepscape,
Stalagmite stark;
And sleep
Itself was quiet with this tower to mark
Meaning which matter, given form, can keep.
In 1962, Lee publically charged the Litchfield administration with conduct that threated the “academic integrity” of the university. The charges included the difficulties presented by class size, the new trimester system, and a general failure to devote resources to undergraduate education. (In the 60s, the University faced serious financial difficulties, difficulties that led Litchfield to negotiate with Harrisburg for the 1966 bail-out that resulted in Pitt’s status as a “state-related” institution.) Litchfield created a committee of seven professors to consider the charges. The committee included Adolf Grunbaum, the Mellon Professor of Philosophy, faculty members from the Schools of Business and Law, and the chairs of Political Science and Physics. Their report concluded, “Each of the issues he raised has been reduced essentially to divergent understanding, hurt feelings, reasonable human failures or goals out of harmony with institutional objectives.” Lee retired in 1973.
Charles Crow, Professor. Charles Crow began teaching in the English department as a graduate student in 1931. He had a long record of successful undergraduate teaching. As the graduate program in English grew in the 1950s, and then quite dramatically in the 1960s, Crow became one of the most sought after MA and PhD dissertation advisors. One of his students, Peggy Knapp, said:
I was a graduate student in the early 1960s when I took courses from Charles Crow. At this time PhD candidates were still required to prepare for the profession by studying and taking exams in all the major periods and authors. Professor Crow taught a wide range of periods, authors, and genres and was widely admired in the English Department for both the breadth and depth of his learning. His breadth suggested a phrase like “man of learning,” which was high praise at the time, but sounds amateurish now. There was nothing amateurish about Crow’s erudition, though, except perhaps his love of learning; it was crisp and rigorous. In particular, he was ahead of his time in raising with his students issues that would soon become the stuff of “literary theory.”
In 1970, Crow was honored as a “Distinguished Service Professor.” In his letter of support, Robert Whitman wrote:
For years, his undergraduate courses were the most popular of the department’s offerings. Generations of graduate students have worshipped Charles—and I use that extravagant term advisedly, for they found in him the model of a stimulating and provocative scholar-teacher. While he may not be what is known as a “publishing scholar”…, I find that Charles is nevertheless widely known and respected throughout the country and even abroad. I know that several of our most eminent Mellon Professors acknowledge his mastership in the area of Shakespearean criticism; and all of us who have heard him lecture recognize the extraordinarily broad learning and the profound mind.
Crow retired in 1973. In the introduction to a festschrift offered to Crow on his retirement, Richard Tobias also noted the range of Crow’s reading and teaching. He said that while many professors concentrate on a figure or period, enacting “a concentration that the academic community admires”:
Crow, on the other hand, has taught American literature, criticism, Milton, and Shakespeare. He offered seminars recently on John Dryden, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Browning. He taught for three years a sophomore Introduction to Poetry course so successfully that rising enrollments drove him away. His committee wrote a fifty-five page syllabus for a freshman writing course designed to make college writing a cultural experience rather than an exercise to be endured. Crow is the first to know the new Russian novel, the last French critic, or a fresh recording of an opera. From the early 1930s until now Crow is a man thinking in a time when thought seems a commodity snatched from sick hurry. His lectures were of uncommonly high caliber because he brought so much to his classes.
In 2007, the University received a gift of $1.5 million to endow the Charles Crow Chair in English. The donor was Thomas H. McIntosh, a 1948 graduate of the School of Liberal Arts. McIntosh was not an English major; he went on to earn a JD from Michigan in 1951 and then to a long and successful career with H.J. Heinz. The gift, McIntosh said, was in honor of a “memorable and valuable teacher, whose guidance to me as a freshman composition student was much appreciated then and later in my career.”
It is surely rare that a gift of this size is given in honor of a composition course and its teacher. Charles Crow earned his BA, MA and PhD from our department. Crow shaped and was shaped by a tradition of teaching that has a long and rich history in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh.
Abe Laufe was promoted to Professor in 1967. He retired in 1971. Laufe published short pieces in popular magazines, like Women’s Day and Ladies Home Companion. He was a popular lecturer and entertainer. He was also a scholar of American theater. In the 1960s he published two books, often cited in his field: Anatomy of a Hit: Long Run Plays on Broadway from 1900 to the Present Day (Hawthorne Books, 1966) and Broadway’s Greatest Musicals (Funk and Wagnall’s, 1969). He also completed an edited collection of letters, Army Doctor’s Wife on the Frontier: Letters from Alaska and the Far West, 1874-1878 (Pittsburgh, 1962; preliminary editing by Russell J. Ferguson). In 1978, he published The Wicked Stage: A History of Theater Censorship and Harassment in the United States (Ungar). Laufe regularly taught courses in composition and assisted Peterson on the “magic lantern” lecture course.
Dorothy Miller was promoted to Professor in 1969. In 1965, Miller received a $35,000 grant for a National Defense Education Act English Institute, cosponsored with School of Education. The institute was a summer program for 40 high school teachers across the nation. The other instructors were Edward Anthony (Linguistics), Abe Laufe, and Edwin Peterson.
[Frank Whittemore Wadsworth] Frank Whittemore Wadsworth (PhD Princeton) was appointed as Professor in 1962, and he served as the first Dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Division of Humanities. Before his appointment, Wadsworth had taught at UCLA. He had been a Guggenhiem Fellow at the University of London’s Folger Library. His research areas included 16th and 17th century British literature. He was best known for his book, The Poacher from Stratford: A Partial Account of the Controversy Over the Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays (California UP, 1958). Wadsworth left Pittsburgh in 1968 to become Academic Vice-President at the State University of New York’s new Purchase campus, where both a fellowship program and a student drama award now carry his name.
Walter Evert (PhD Princeton). In 1964, Evert was hired as an Associate Professor and to serve as Associate Dean, Division of the Humanities. Like Wadsworth, Evert had been on the faculty at UCLA; he had previously taught at Princeton and Williams. He was promoted to Professor in 1967. Evert was the author of Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton, 1965) and Approaches to Teaching Keats’s Poetry (MLA, 1991).
Alexander Welsh (PhD Harvard) was hired at the rank of Professor in 1967. He left in the early 1970s for UCLA, and he joined the faculty at Yale in 1991, where he was the Emily Sanford Professor of English. In 1971, he published The City of Dickens (Oxford). From 1975 to 1981, he was the editor of the journal, Nineteenth Century Fiction.
[Thomas Philbrick] Thomas Philbrick (PhD Harvard) was appointed as an Associate Professor in 1962; he was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1967. He was the author of James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Harvard, 1961) and St. John de Crèvecoeur (Twayne, 1970). He later edited works by Cooper, Richard Henry Dana, Joshua Slocum and Michael Scott. With his son, Nathaniel Philbrick (2000 National Book Award winner for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex), Philbrick was the editor of The Mayflower Papers: Selected Writings of Colonial New England (Penguin, 2007). Philbrick had a stack of Sunfish sailboats stored in his front yard waiting for the racing season; he raced them at the highest national level, usually winning.
[Alan Markman] Alan Markman was promoted to Associate Professor in 1960 and Professor in 1966. He died in 1970 at 52. Many thought that he would be the next department chair. Markman was a medievalist who taught courses in the history of the English language. In 1966, he won an IBM grant with Nuel Belnap in the Philosophy department to develop and teach a new course, “Application of Computer Techniques to Humanities Research.” He was the coauthor, with Barnet Kottler, of A Computer Concordance to Five Middle English Poems (Pittsburgh 1966). From 1967 to 1969, he served as senior staff in an English Language Institute project in Bangkok, Thailand, under dual funding from the University of Pittsburgh and the Rockefeller Foundation. With Erwin Steinberg (at CMU), he published a textbook for courses in the history of the language, English Then and Now: Readings and Exercises (Random House, 1970), revised as Exercises in the History of English (University Press of America, 1983).
[Robert L. Gale] Robert L. Gale was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1961 and Professor in 1966. He retired in 1987. From the mid-60s to the mid-70s, Gale was the department’s Director of Graduate Studies. In the 1960s, he published articles on Willa Cather and Henry James and three books: Plots and Characters in the Fiction of Henry James (Archon), Thomas Crawford: American Sculptor (U of Pittsburgh P), and The Caught Image: Figurative Language in the Fiction of Henry James (U of North Carolina P). Gale is still active as a scholar at the time of this writing (2014); he has had a remarkably productive career, including articles on a wide variety of topics in American literature and over 30 books, the most recent of which are Characters and Plots In James Welch’s Novels (Word Association, 2014), Characters and Plots in the Fiction of Kate Chopin (McFarland, 2014) and a reissue of The Caught Image: Figurative Language in the Fiction of Henry James (U of North Carolina, 2012). Gale published several volumes in the McFarland series, Plots and Characters, and with the McFarland Author Encyclopedias--most recently, Characters and Plots in the Fiction of J.M. Cain (2011) and the Edwin Arlington Robinson Encyclopedia (2011). Gale published several books with the Greenwood Companions series, most recently the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion (2003); several with the Twayne United States Authors series, most recently Louis L’Amour (1992); and several with the Boise State University Western Authors series, most recently Matt Braun (1990). These books have won Gale a broad and varied and enthusiastic audience.
[Richard Tobias] Richard Tobias was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1966 and Professor in 1969. Tobias (known as Tob) died in 2006, at 81, in his 54th year of teaching, 49 of them at the University of Pittsburgh. Tobias was a legend among his students and a good friend and mentor to his colleagues. He served for over 40 years with the University Senate, including two terms as President. He was active with the Anti-Discrimination Committee when the University granted health benefits to same sex partners in 2005. He was a strong advocate for academic freedom. He had resigned from the University of Colorado when the faculty were required to sign a McCarthy-era loyalty oath. He served from 1960-1981 on the Senate Tenure and Academic Freedom committee. Tobias was Dean for the 1985 voyage of Semester at Sea, and he was invited as a Visiting Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge University, in 1989. At his death, he endowed two Richard C. and Barbara N. Tobias graduate student fellowships.
At his memorial service, the English department chair, David Bartholomae, said
We will remember him as an exuberant and passionate scholar, writer and teacher. He taught courses on the Victorians, on Shakespeare, on modern poetry and on comedy. Tob was always in mid-thought, always ready to tell you what he was reading, what he was writing, and what his students were doing — often in a single sentence and always in his strong and resonant voice. He was quick with a joke or a song, a bit of verse or a line from a favorite novel.
Tobias was the author of The Art of James Thurber (Ohio State UP, 1969) and T.E. Brown: The Manx Poet (Twayne, 1970); he was the editor of Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow (U of Pittsburgh Press, 1974) and (with his wife, Barbara) Bibliographies of Studies in Victorian Literature: 1975-1984 (AMS, 1991). He was a charter member of the editorial board of Victorian Poetry and he helped to prepare the annual bibliography for Victorian Studies from 1959 to 1994, editing the process from 1975-1984. At his death, he was working on a biography of the late-Victorian novelist Rhoda Broughton.
Associate Professors
Richard C. Snyder was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1969. He retired in 1978 for health problems that included severely restricted eyesight. With Kathleen D. Byrne, Snyder published Chrysalis: Willa Cather in Pittsburgh, 1896-1906 (Historical Society Of Western Pennsylvania, 1980).
[Gerd Fraenkel] Gerd Fraenkel (PhD Indiana) was hired as an Associate Professor in 1962 and was gone from the department lists by 1967. Fraenkel was a linguist, author of two textbooks, New Aspects of Language (Ginn & Co, 1964) and Languages of the World (Ginn & Co, 1967). He worked on issues related to Esperanto and simplified spelling. He was hired to organize a new interdisciplinary Linguistics Program, and he served as the Chair of the Interdisciplinary Committee on Linguistics. In 1964, the University announced the formation of a new Department of General Linguistics. Edward Anthony, Director of the University of Michigan’s English Language Institute, was recruited as Chair. Although Fraenkel was clearly by-passed for this position, he was given an appointment in the new department. In 1967, Fraenkel left to teach at the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville. The Gerd Fraenkel papers are held at Vanderbilt University.
[Myron Taube] Myron Taube (PhD, NYU). Trained as a Victorianist, Taube taught fiction and was a central figure in the Writing Program in the 1970s and 80s. In 1966, Taube was recruited from Kutztown State College to serve as a Visiting Associate Professor and to teach courses in fiction writing. The department was still struggling to staff writing courses after Emily Irvine’s retirement in 1964. In 1969, Taube joined the regular faculty as a tenured Associate Professor. He was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1974. He published essays on Thackeray, Joyce, and Defoe and short stories in a wide variety of literary magazines, including “The Investigation” in the North Atlantic Review (Spring, 1971). At his retirement, he endowed a Myron Taube Fiction Prize for undergraduate writing majors. [add pdf ]
Montgomery Culver was promoted to Associate rank in 1962 and Professor in 1971. Culver served as Director of the Writing program until 1978, when Ed Ochester was appointed to that position. Culver was a short story writer; in the 1960s he published “Lousy Luck” with Esquire (1962) and “The Chance of a Lifetime” with the Saturday Evening Post (1966). Culver was quiet and shy, not someone you would single out as an important presence. And yet he was—both in the department (as an advocate for the Writing Program) and for his students. Lee Gutkind and Andrew Welsh, both students in the 1960s, recall Culver’s work with student manuscripts. Gutkind said, “He was so smart—he knew how to take a pencil to a manuscript and help you on a one-to-one basis in that way.” Welsh, after reviewing some old assignments he had written, said
You can hear Monty’s voice pushing, pulling, pleading for clean writing, accurate writing, fresh writing—for prose that sees things honestly, that [Montgomery Culver] hears things truly, that moves with the rhythms of something alive, and not dead. It’s impossible to calculate how important those weekly exercises in giving shape to words were to lives trying to take shape themselves. Along with all the knowledge about the various kinds of story-structure and the effects they can create, and about how to handle a moving point of view, or a section of dialect, Monty is able to give you a sense that it’s all worth it; that a good transition from one scene to the next is an action of physical grace, like throwing a good curve ball; that getting a sentence right comes closer than most things to fulfilling your moral nature; that seeing something clearly, as it really is, is a gift to the world it’s in your power to give.
Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. (PhD Syracuse). Marrs was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1967. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1969 and promoted to Professor in the 1970s. His major work was the 3 volume edition of The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb (Cornell UP; 1975, 1976, 1978).
[Harry J. Mooney, Jr.] Harry J. Mooney, Jr. (PhD Pittsburgh, 1962). Mooney began the decade teaching as an Instructor but was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1962, after completing his degree. He was promoted to Associate rank in 1968 and Professor in the 1970s. Mooney did almost all of his important scholarly work early in his career. In 1957, as a graduate student, he published The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter (U of Pittsburgh P, 1957). This was followed by three books: James Gould Cozzens: Novelist of Intellect (Pittsburgh, 1964); The Shapeless God: Essays in Modern Literature, editor, with Thomas F. Staley (Pittsburgh, 1968); and Leo Tolstoy: The Epic Vision (U of Tulsa, 1969).
[James D. Simmonds] James D. Simmonds (PhD LSU). Simmonds was hired as Assistant Professor in 1965 and promoted to Associate in 1967. He was the founding editor of Milton Studies, a journal sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The editorial board included English department colleagues Charles Crow, Marcia Landy, and Harry Mooney. The first volume, published in 1969, was devoted to the 300th anniversary of Paradise Lost and occasioned a university sponsored series of lectures on Milton.
[add pdf]
In 1969, Simmonds prepared a report on “The Personnel Crisis in the English Department,” a report which was said to have helped to create additional tenure track faculty lines in the 1970s. He based the report on a comparison with other departments at the University of Pittsburgh (French, German, Hispanic and Speech) and with the English departments at Penn State and Indiana. He notes the recent increase in faculty lines, but he argues
If the progress we have made in these matters seems substantial, that is a sign of the length of the journey, not of our having reached port. If we are more satisfied with how far we have come than concerned with how far we have to go, we will deceive ourselves in the same way as the Pittsburgher who thinks he breathes clean air. The Pittsburgh of twenty years ago is no place from which to draw one’s standard of air quality; the English department of two years ago is no place from which to draw one’s standard of an adequately staffed academic program.
Assistant Professors
Donald Tritschler left the department in 1962 to take a position at Skidmore College where, in 1967, he was listed as an Associate Professor of English.
Daniel Marder left the department in 1962 for the University of Tulsa, where he served as Professor and department Chair. Marder published The Craft of Technical Writing (Macmillan, 1960), the edited volume, Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Twayne, 1967), Exiles at Home: A Story of Literature in 19th Century America (University Press of America, 1984) and The Arnold/Andre Transcripts: A Reconstruction (Library Research Associates, 1993).
[Robert C. Laing, Jr.] Robert C. Laing, Jr. (PhD, Pittsburgh 1962) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1962. In 1964 he left to join the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford, where he taught until 1981. Laing was active in local theater. The University of Pittsburgh at Bradford offers a Robert C. Laing, Jr., Creative Arts Award.
Arthur H. Saxon (PhD Yale) completed his BA at the University of Pittsburgh in 1956. He received his MA from Columbia in English and Comparative Literature and his PhD in the History of the Theatre and Dramatic Criticism from Yale. Saxon returned to the University of Pittsburgh in 1966, where he taught for two years in Speech and Theater and one year, 1968/1969, as an Assistant Professor in the English department. Saxon has published widely on theater, circus, and popular entertainment. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1971. He is author of Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France (Yale UP, 1968); The Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow & The Romantic Age of the English Circus (Archon 1978); and the award-winning P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (Columbia UP, 1989). He is also the editor of Barnum’s letters. Saxon’s yet unpublished memoir contains recollections of Charles Crow. You can read an excerpt. [add pdf]
[W. Austin Flanders] W. Austin Flanders (PhD Wisconsin) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1964 and promoted to Associate in 1969. He taught graduate seminars on 18th century British literature and a wide range of undergraduate literature courses. Flanders was involved in the attempts to establish a Comparative Literature Program at the University. His essay on Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (Centennial Review, 1972) was reprinted in Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1975). He was the author of Structures of Experience: History, Society, and Personal Life in the 18th Century British Novel (U of South Carolina P, 1984). Flanders served on the editorial board of Eighteenth Century Life.
[Robert Marshall] Robert Marshall (PhD Wisconsin) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1964 and promoted to Associate rank in 1969. Trained as a medievalist, Marshall taught graduate courses in Anglo-Saxon language and literature, Chaucer, the 14th century, and medieval drama. He taught a range of undergraduate courses including freshman composition, freshman honors, and the literature of sport. Marshall was involved with the Pittsburgh community through Project Upward Bound (1966-69), a program of support for low-income, under-achieving high school students. He was Co-director of Project Exchange (1968-69) which arranged two-week faculty exchanges between the University of Pittsburgh and two historically black colleges, Alabama State College and Jackson State College. In the 1970s, Marshall initiated and directed the English component of a federally sponsored program, TTT (Training the Trainers of Teachers), designed to bring faculty from the disciplines into productive contact with teachers and subject area programs in Schools of Education. From 1969-1971 he was the department’s “Coordinator of Innovation,” head of a committee directed to rethink the undergraduate curriculum and the training of Teaching Assistants. Marshall was active in the AAUP, serving as President for several years in the mid-70s.
In 1972, Marshall was one of three individuals presented by the department to the Dean of Faculty in Arts and Sciences, Jerome Rosenberg, as candidates to follow Robert Whitman as department chair. Whitman had resigned; Walt Evert was serving as the Acting Chair. Marshall was the only internal candidate of the three. The other two were Michael Shugrue, director of English programs (and the ADE) for the MLA, and Robert Hinman, the chair at Emory. The Dean had made it clear that he wanted an outside candidate, someone to help move the department to national prominence in research, and there were hints that with the right choice, the department would receive additional faculty lines. The appointment went to Robert Hinman, who took over as chair in 1973. Marshall had long been an advocate for teaching; he was active in promoting curriculum experimentation and curriculum reform, both in the department and in the College, and, in 1973, he was appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, serving as a Dean of students and undergraduate programs, a position he held until 1978.
James D. Merritt (PhD Wisconsin) was hired as Lecturer in 1964 and promoted to Assistant in 1965. He left in 1966 for Brooklyn College, where he taught until his retirement in 1995.
[Philip K. Wion] Philip K. Wion (PhD Yale) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1967 and promoted to Associate in 1973. Wion (rhymes with “lion,” he told his students) worked in the areas of Renaissance literature and of literature and psychoanalysis. His essay on “The Absent Mother in Wuthering Heights,” American Imago (1985), was reprinted in the casebook, Wuthering Heights, edited by Linda Peterson (Bedford/St. Martins, 2003). Wion was very active in faculty governance, initially at the departmental level, where he was at the center of the group that wrote the English Department’s By-Laws, and later with the University Senate and the American Association of University Professors. He served multiple terms on Faculty Assembly and Senate Council, and on the Senate Budget Policies Committee (several as chair). He co-chaired the committee that devised the University’s Planning and Budgeting System, and served multiple terms on the University Planning and Budgeting Committee. He was president of the United Faculty (dually affiliated with the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers) during the ‘80s and early ‘90s, at the height of the (unsuccessful) effort to win collective bargaining rights for Pitt faculty, and continued as an officer of the Pitt AAUP chapter beyond his retirement from the University in 2009.
[James F. Knapp] James F. Knapp (PhD Connecticut), still an active member of the faculty, was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1966. He is currently Professor of English and Senior Associate Dean of the Deitrich School of Arts and Sciences. Knapp is the author of Ezra Pound (Twayne, 1979), the Norton Poetry Workshop, a multi-media CD-ROM published in conjunction with the Norton Anthology of Poetry, (W.W. Norton & Co, 1996), and Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work (Northwestern UP, 1998). He has published widely in academic journals with essays on such topics as primitivism in modern art, nationalism, modern poetry, and the culture of modernity. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on literary and cultural history, including Anglo-Irish literature, and Modernism in literature and the visual arts. Knapp has integrated multi-media computer technology into his teaching for many years. In 2005, he turned his attention to the Web as editor of the Norton Poetry Workshop Online. He is a past chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Information Technology.
Knapp provided leadership in a variety of roles in the English department, during difficult (and sometimes contentious) periods of curriculum review and through an extended period as Director of Graduate Studies. Since 2000, Knapp has provided crucial leadership as Associate and then Senior Associate Dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. As a Dean, he has taken the lead in a number of crucial and controversial areas of administration, but none have been as central to the work of the English department as his consistent efforts to develop a full-time, non-tenure-track faculty with substantial benefits and a place in departmental and university governance.
[Marcia Landy] Marcia Landy (PhD Rochester), who will retire in January 2015, was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1967. Landy was recruited as a Renaissance scholar to teach and write on the poetry of John Milton, but she quickly became a key figure in the reconfiguration of English studies both on our campus and nationally, efforts that led the nation. Early in her time in the department, she began to work on European literature. In the early 1970s, she taught the first courses on women at the University of Pittsburgh and was the primary author of the proposal to establish the Women’s Studies program (1971). In the 1970s, Landy served on the organizing committee of the Comparative Literature Program and later as its co-chair, with Edward Dudley of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. Courses in film were listed in the curriculum of Comp Lit—initially one developed by Landy and Daniel Russell, from French and Italian, another by Landy and Mariolina Salvatori, from English. With Bill Judson, Carnegie Museum Director of Film, and Bruce Goldstein, Psychology, Landy was appointed to a committee charged to develop an undergraduate Film Studies Program. Once approved, the new interdisciplinary Film Studies program was housed in the English Department and, in 1979, Lucy Fischer was hired to serve as Director. Since the late 1970s, the Film Studies Program has become an important part of the undergraduate and graduate mission of the College, and its students, faculty, and research have achieved international renown.
Landy is currently Distinguished Professor of English/Film Studies with a secondary appointment in French and Italian. She remains an extraordinarily productive teacher and scholar. Her books include Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (1986); Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930-1960 (1991); Film, Politics, and Gramsci (1994); Queen Christina (1996, with Amy Villarejo); Cinematic Uses of the Past (1996); The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality and Spectacle in Italian Cinema 1930-1943 (1998); Italian Film (2000); The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (2000); Stars: The Film Reader (2004 co-edited with Lucy Fischer); Monty Python’s Flying Circus (2005), and Stardom, Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema (2008). Her essays on cultural theory, cinema history, national cinema, and genres have appeared in anthologies and in such journals as Screen, Post Script, Jump Cut, Film Criticism, The Journal of Film and Video, New German Critique, French Review, American Imago, Critical Quarterly and Cinema Journal. Her articles on Gramsci have appeared in Rethinking Marxism, boundary 2, and Critical Studies. She was the recipient of the 2005 Chancellor's Senior Research Award. In 2007, Landy was appointed Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies; in 2014 she won the Provost’s award for Excellence in Mentoring, an award which recognized her successful work with generations of graduate students. As a teacher, she has been a central figure for both graduate and undergraduates interested in history, visual media, and theory.
Barrett J. Mandell (PhD Connecticut) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1968. He left in 1970 to take a position at Douglas College, Rutgers University. Mandell was interested in alternative forms of teaching, including “self-directed” classes or “nondirective” teaching. He published essays on the teaching of reading and writing and was the author of Literature and the English Department (NCTE, 1970) and Three Language-Arts Curriculum Models: Pre-Kindergarten Through College (NCTE, 1980). He also wrote on autobiography. He left Rutgers to become an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Business Administration, Fordham University. In 1981, he founded SWG Consulting Resources, a company that provides communication and time-management courses to the business community.
William Searle (PhD UC Berkeley) hired as an Assistant Professor in 1968 and promoted to Associate Professor in 1973. He was the author of The Saint & the Skeptics: Joan of Arc in the Work of Mark Twain, Anatole France, and Bernard Shaw (Wayne State UP, 1976).
[Cynthia (Matlack) Sutherland] Cynthia (Matlack) Sutherland (PhD Penn) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1968. She worked on the use of computers in humanities research and, with her first husband, William Matlack, published ”A Statistical Approach to Problems of Attribution: A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” (College English, 1968). She also published essays on 18th century British literature and was a founding editor of Eighteenth Century Life. During her nearly 30 years at Pitt, Sutherland taught literature and writing courses ranging from 18th-century literature to Shakespeare, children's literature, women and literature, and myth and folktale. She was active in the development of Women’s Studies on our campus and taught courses in the program’s early years.
[Rae Lee Siporin] Rae Lee Siporin (PhD UCLA) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1968. While at Pitt, and while serving as Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Siporin was part of the group that drafted the original proposal for our program in Women’s Studies (now “Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies”). Siporin edited the 1972 Proceedings of the Conference, “Women and Education: A Feminist Perspective,” a collection of papers on the “state and future of women’s studies and the position of women in the academy” sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh and the MLA Commission on the Status of Women. Siporin left Pittsburgh in the mid-70s to serve as Dean at Stockton State College in New Jersey. She went from there to Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire and from Franklin Pierce, in 1979, to UCLA where she served for 22 years as the Director of Admissions. At UCLA, Siporin co-founded the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Faculty/Staff Network. UCLA is home to the Rae Lee Siporin LGBT Library.
[Ronald Curran] Ronald Curran (PhD Penn) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1969 and promoted to Associate Professor in 1974. He published essays on Hawthorne, Poe, and Hemingway, and a book, Witches, Wraiths and Warlocks: Supernatural Tales of the American Renaissance (Fawcett, 1971). Curran taught courses in literature and psychoanalysis; he also maintained a practice as a Jungian therapist.
Donald Petesch (PhD Texas) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1969 and promoted to Associate Professor in 1976. He taught courses in American literature, including African-American literature. He was a published poet, although he did not teach regularly in the Writing Program. He was the author of A Spy in the Enemy’s Country: The Emergence of Modern Black Literature (U of Iowa P, 1989), chosen as an Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in 1990. In 1986, Petesch was a Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Monterrey, Mexico.
Christopher Rawson (PhD Washington) joined the department in 1968 as an Instructor and was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1972, after completing his degree. Although hired as a specialist in 18th Century literature, he taught broadly in the undergraduate curriculum, including a course in satire that grew to 100 and attracted attention for its use of visual materials and its blend of Horace and Pogo, Swift and Lenny Bruce. Rawson taught critical writing, Irish drama, Shakespeare, and Pittsburgh playwright August Wilson, with whom he had developed a friendship through his role as a local theater critic. Rawson continues to teach Shakespeare and Wilson today (2014). In the 1960s, Rawson played an active role working to revise and revive the humanities curriculum, and from 1974-77 he served as the department’s Associate Chair.
[Christopher Rawson] From 1983 to 2009, he was also theater critic and theater editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, covering theater in Pittsburgh, New York, London and Canada. In 1984, he started the Post-Gazette Performer of the Year Award, now in its 31st year. Rawson serves on the editorial board of the Best Plays Theater Annual, is a board member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame, has twice served as chair of the American Theatre Critics Association (1991-93 and 2007-11), and produces an annual satire of Pittsburgh news and newsmakers, Off the Record. In 1999, he wrote Where Stone Walls Meet the Sea, a 650-page centennial history of the summer colony and golf club in Little Compton, Rhode Island, important because of its course, the personal design of Donald Ross. With Laurence A. Glasco (University of Pittsburgh history department), he is the author of August Wilson: Pittsburgh Places in His Life and Plays (Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, 2011). Their larger work, August Wilson's Pittsburgh, is expected in 2015 (University of Pittsburgh Press).
[Virginia Elliott] Virginia Elliott joined the department in 1967 as a Lecturer through a joint appointment with the School of Education, where she had been a member of the faculty since 1965. As Edwin Peterson moved toward retirement, Elliott was brought in to direct the Composition Program, to train the graduate assistants, and to coordinate the pool of non-tenure track instructors. With Lois Josephs, a PhD student in the department, she prepared and edited an NCTE report on English for the Academically Talented Student in the Secondary School (1969). She held the position of Director of Composition until 1974, when William E. Coles, Jr., was recruited for that position. Elliott also taught courses in children’s literature and women’s studies.
Instructors/Lecturers
The College catalog stopped routinely listing non-tenure track faculty in 1960; it stopped listing them altogether in 1965.
Those present in the catalog in the first few years and/or recalled by former students:
Marcus T. Allias
Raymond J. Cristina
William Hickman
Sydney A. Kneebone
Dorothy O’Connor
Mary Cooper Robb
Betty Anne Stroup
By the 1960s, the number of BA and MA students had grown so considerably, and the records are so readily available, that we couldn’t begin to list them all or to provide brief biographies. The individuals below are meant to be representative. We have prepared a longer list (names only) which is available through this link: BA and MA 1960s. We believe that the list of PhD students is a complete list.
1. 1960s PhD Graduates (and dissertation titles)
Theodora L. Pitts (PhD 1960; diss: “Conflicting Points of View in Byron Biography”). Theodora Pitts West taught at Ohio State and then, for the rest of her career, at West Chester State University, where she founded the literary magazine.
William Francis Cunningham (PhD 1961; diss: “The Satire of Charles Churchill”). Cunningham taught at Duquesne University and then at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, where he served as department Chair.
[Ralph G. Johnson] Ralph G. Johnson (PhD 1961; diss: "A Criticial Third Edition of Edmund Tilney’s The Flour of Friendshippe”). Johnson taught at Le Moyne College, Dillard University, Rust College and he retired as a Professor of English from the University of Memphis.
Eben Edward Bass (PhD 1962; diss: “Ethical Form in the Fiction of Henry James”). Bass was Chair of the English department at Slippery Rock University, where there is a memorial scholarship in his name. He published articles on a variety of topics and a book, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Poet and Painter (Lang, 1990).
Ida Mary Collura (PhD 1962; diss: “The Development of Theme and Style in Elinor Wylie’s Prose”). Collura was the editor of Pittsburgh Festival published by Overture, the Duquesne University literary magazine, to celebrate Pittsburgh’s bicentennial. It contains poems, stories and reflections, many of them from former students in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh.
William John Dregan (PhD 1962; diss: "A Study of the Poetic Craftsmanship of Thomas Gray as Shown by his English Poems”).
Marion Baker Fairman (PhD 1962; diss: “The Neo-Medieval Plays of Dorothy L. Sayers”). Fairman taught at Westminster College and Miami University of Ohio. She wrote materials for Christian education and the Christian liturgical calendar.
[Ruth Lina Marie Kuschmierz] Ruth Lina Marie Kuschmierz (PhD 1962; diss: “The Instruction of a Christen Woman: A Critical Edition of the Tudor Translation”). Kuschmierz was a Professor of English and German at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg Campus.
Robert Cutter Laing (PhD 1962; diss: “Humor in George Eliot’s Novels”). Laing joined the faculty of the English department at the University of Pittsburgh. You can follow his career on the faculty page.
Dorothy Schuchman McCoy (PhD 1962; diss: “Tradition and Convention: A Study of Periphrasis in English Pastoral Poetry, 1557-1713”). McCoy taught at Point Park and was active in the Medieval and Renaissance Society. She published her dissertation with Walter De Gruyter (1965), and she was among the authors of Human Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (University of Pittsburgh Publications on the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Vol. IV, 1978).
Fred Bates McEwen (PhD 1962; diss: “Techniques of Description in Eight Selected Novels of Sir Walter Scott”). McEwen was Professor of English at Waynesburg College.
Harry J. Mooney, Jr. (PhD 1962; diss: “James Gould Cozzen, Novelist of Intellect”). Mooney joined the faculty of the English department at the University of Pittsburgh. You can follow his career on the faculty page.
Max Andrew Nemmer (PhD 1962; diss: “The Dramatic Significance of Physical Distinction in Characters of English Renaissance Drama”). Nemmer joined the faculty at Clarion University.
Thomas Francis Smith (PhD 1962; diss: “Contemporary Criticism of the Novel: An Analysis of Basic Approaches”).
Elizabeth Wiley (PhD 1962; diss: “Prose Sources of Imagery in the Poetry of Edward Taylor”). Wiley had a long career at Susquehanna University. She is the author of Concordance to the Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe (Susquehanna UP, 1989)
Williams Hickman (PhD 1963; diss: “The Influence of Attitudes toward Religion Upon the Writings of H.L. Menken”).
Daniel Marder (PhD 1963; diss: “The Best of Brackenridge”). Marder joined the faculty of the English department at the University of Pittsburgh. You can follow his career on the faculty page.
Mercedes Cunningham Monjian (PhD 1963; diss: “Matthew Arnold’s Crticism: The Mythic Strain”). Monjian published Robinson Jeffers: A Study in Inhumanism with the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1958. She taught at Westminster College.
Edwin H. Nierenberg (PhD 1963; diss: “Two Essayists on Man: Alexander Pope and E.M. Forster”). Nierenberg had a long career at San Francisco State University. He published essays on Forster and Pope.
[Ronald Burt Ribman] Ronald Burt Ribman (PhD 1963; diss: “John Keats: The Woman and the Vision”). Ribman taught at Otterbein College for a year and then left the academy to return to a career as a dramatist. He is the author of a long list of plays, many published on and off Broadway. Journey of the Fifth Horse won an Obie Award in 1967. Other plays include The Ceremony of Innocence (1952), The Final War of Olly Winter (1967), Passing Through Exotic Places (1969), A Break in the Skin (1972), and Sweet Table at the Richelieu (1987). He also wrote for television. The Final War of Olly Winter (1967) won an Emmy nomination. Ribman was a Guggenheim Fellow. He won the Straw Hat Award for The Poison Tree (1973) and both a Dramatists Guild and Hull-Warriner Award for Cold Storage (1976).
[Albert Edward Schmittlein] Albert Edward Schmittlein (PhD 1963; “Willa Cather’s Novels: An Evolving Art”). Schmittlein had a long career at Slippery Rock University, where he served as English department chair and Dean of Arts and Sciences. He was also the Slippery Rock golf coach.
[Thomas F. Staley] Thomas F. Staley (PhD 1963; diss: “F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of His Development as a Novelist”). Staley was Professor of English, Director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and the Harry Huntt Ransom Chair in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, Austin. He retired in 2011. Staley made many contributions to the study of Modernism, the work of James Joyce, and the building of library collections. His early publications were connected to Pittsburgh: The Shapeless God: Essay on Modern Fiction, edited with Harry Mooney (U of Pittsburgh P, 1968); Approaches to Ulysses: Ten Essays, edited with Bernard Benstock (U of Pittsburgh P, 1970); and Approaches to Joyce’s Portrait, edited with Bernard Benstock (U of Pittsburgh P, 1976). He also edited the work of the University of Pittsburgh graduate, Stanley Burnshaw: The Collected Poems and Selected Prose (U of Texas P, 2002). Staley was the editor of the “Studies in Modernism” book series, and the founding editor of Joyce Studies: An Annual and the James Joyce Quarterly. Recent publications include: Writing the Lives of Writers (St. Martins P, 1998), Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert's Paris Journal (U of Texas P, 1993), and An Annotated Critical Bibliography of James Joyce (St. Martins P, 1989).
Robert Howard Sykes (PhD 1963; diss: “Ernest Hemingway’s Style: A Descriptive Analysis”). Sykes taught at Bethany College until 1967, when he joined the faculty at West Liberty College in West Virginia, where he served as Chair of the School of Humanities and founded the Poetry Lecture Series. He taught at West Liberty until his retirement in 1995. In 1964, Sykes was a Fulbright Exchange Professor at the University of Kita Kyushu, Japan.
[Bernard Schroder Adams] Bernard Schroder Adams (PhD 1964; diss: “Milton and Metaphor: The Artis Logicae and the Imagery of the Shorter English Poems”). Bernard S. Adams became the ninth President of Ripon College (Wisconsin) in 1966. He held that post until 1985. He is the author of An Old Institution of the Highest Order: The Story of Ripon College (Ripon College, 1977).
Raj Kumar Gupta (PhD 1964; diss: “Form and Style in Herman Melville’s Pierre: Of the Ambiguities”). Gupta’s dissertation was one of the first written by an Indian on a topic in American literature. Gupta may have taught in India, although we have not been able to confirm this.
John Paul Mellon (PhD 1964; diss: “Byron’s Manfred and the Critics: A Review of Sources and Ideas”). Mellon taught at Clarion State College, where he also served as Dean of Liberal Arts. In 1973 he was named President of Western State College in Gunniston, Colorado, a post he held until his retirement in 1987.
Elinora Smith (PhD 1964; diss: “William Cowper: A Literary Study”).
[John Pierce Watkins] John Pierce Watkins (PhD 1964; diss: “The Hero in Sir Thomas Malory”). Watkins had a long and distinguished career at California University of Pennsylvania. He served as English department chair, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and, from 1977 to 1992, the university’s president. Watkins Hall is named in his honor.
[Eugene Robert August] Eugene Robert August (PhD 1965; diss; “Work Inscapes: A Study of the Poetic Vocabulary of Gerard Manley Hopkins”). August joined the English department at the University of Dayton, where he was instrumental in developing the university’s Study Abroad Program. He was the author of John Stuart Mill: A Mind at Large (Scribner, 1976) and Men's Studies: A Selected and Annotated Interdisciplinary Bibliography (Libraries Unlimited, 1985). In 1992, he was awarded the Alumni Chair in Humanities.
[Ralph Armando Ciancio] Ralph Armando Ciancio (PhD 1965; diss: “The Grotesque in Modern American Fiction: An Existential Theory”). Ciancio taught at Carnegie Tech and then had a long and distinguished career at Skidmore, where there is now a Ciancio Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Ciancio taught writing and American literature and published several essays and book chapters on American fiction. He served as department chair at Skidmore from 1980 -1985.
Betty Smith Cox (PhD 1965; diss: “Cruces of Beowulf”). From 1968 until her retirement, Cox taught at Gardner-Webb University (North Carolina), where she also served as Chair of the department of English language and literature.
Pasquale Di Pasquale (PhD 1965; diss: “The Form of Piers Plowman and the Liturgy”). Pasquale became President of Loras College, a Catholic college in Dubuque, Iowa.
John Joseph Kelleher (PhD 1965; diss: “The Theme of Freedom in the Novels of Joyce Cary”). Kelleher taught for many years at East Illinois University.
[Clare Marie Murphy] Clare Marie Murphy (PhD 1965; diss: “The English Renaissance as an Age Conscious of Itself”). Murphy taught at the University of Rhode Island from 1964 until 1990, when she retired to join the Moreanum Center in Angers, France, where she edited the journal, Moreana from 1992 to 2002. Murphy was co-editor of Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour (SUNY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989). She published widely on Thomas More and early Tudor humanism and was a reviewer for Renaissance Quarterly. She helped to organize international conferences on More in Ireland (1998), France (2001), Argentina (2004) and the U.S. (2007).
Michael Anthony Murphy (PhD 1965; diss: “Religious Polemic in Old English Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”). Murphy is Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn College, where he taught medieval literature and directed the composition program. He produced a “reader-friendly” edition (with modern spelling) of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
[Norman Rosenfeld] Norman Rosenfeld (PhD 1965; diss: “Definitions of Poetry in the Essays and Poems of Wallace Stevens”). Rosenfeld was a member of the English department at East Carolina University from 1965-1995.
Mary Martin Rountree (PhD 1965; diss: “The Fiction of Conrad Aiken”). M.M. Rountree was the author of “Paul Bowles: Translations from the Moghrebi,” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal (1986).
Charles Thomas Waller (PhD 1965; diss: “The Political Poetry of Jonathan Swift: A Critical Study”). Waller taught at the University of Georgia. With Ronald G. Killion, he was the author of Georgia and the Revolution (Cherokee Publishing Co., 1975) and the editor of Slavery Time: When I was Chillun Down on Marster’s Plantation (Bee Hive Press, 1973), and A Treasury of Georgia Folklore (Cherokee Publishing Co, 1972).
Roy S. Wolper (PhD 1965; diss: “Samuel Johnson and The Drama”). Wolper was Professor of English at Temple University and co-editor of the Scriblerian. He wrote on Augustan satirists, on attitudes towards the Jews in eighteenth-century England, and on Voltairean tales (Candide, Zadig, Le Monde comme il va, Jeannot et Colin).
[Peggy A. Knapp] Peggy A. Knapp (PhD 1966; diss: “The Style of John Wyclif’s English Sermons”). Peggy A. Knapp taught at the University of Connecticut and then, in 1970, joined the faculty in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where she has had a long and distinguished career, and where she continues to serve as Professor of English. In her website, she says:
I am especially interested in what can be discovered about imaginative and argumentative texts from medieval and early modern England through the use of literary and aesthetic theory. I founded and for many years edited an annual book series called Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, an international forum for the discussion of those questions. My book-length studies are: The Style of John Wyclif's English Sermons (Mouton, 1977), Chaucer and the Social Contest (Routledge, 1990), Time-Bound Words: Semantic and Social Economies from Chaucer's England to Shakespeare's (St Martin's Press, 2000), and Chaucerian Aesthetics (Palgrave, 2008). I have also written about Shakespeare, Jonson, Wycherley, and many contemporary authors, critics, and filmmakers. I am currently working on Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility with James F. Knapp.
Bernhard Frank (PhD 1966; “The Wiles of Words: Ambiguity in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry”). Frank taught comparative literature and creative writing at SUNY Buffalo. His poems and translations have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. He was translator/editor of Modern Hebrew Poetry (Iowa UP, 1980), Offering: Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Verlaine (Goldengove Press, 1986), and translator of Rilke's Duino Elegies (Goldengrove Press, 1989). A collection of his poems, American Gothic, was published by Goldengrove Press (1982). Frank edited the poetry journals, Buckle” (1977-1982) and Buckle& (1998-2006).
[Elton Dale Higgs] Elton Dale Higgs (PhD 1966; diss: “The Drama of A Literary Framework in the Works of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl Poet”). Higgs joined the English department at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in 1965. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1970, and to Professor in 1974. His primary area of teaching was the literature and culture of the medieval period. In 1979, he won an NEH grant to develop courses related to “The Humanities in the World of Decision-Making.” He wrote a history of the university, A Gift Renewed: The First Twenty-Five Years of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, 1959-1984, for the UMD’s twenty-fifth anniversary. After his retirement, he self-published his Collected Poems (2011).
James Edmund Magner (PhD 1966; diss: “The Literary Principles and Preoccupations of John Crowe Ransom”). Magner joined the faculty at John Carroll University where he taught until his retirement. He was the author of John Crow Ransom: Critical Principles and Preoccupations (Mouton, 1971). He published eight books of poetry and two novels, all with small local presses.
Robert Edward Mossman (PhD 1966; diss: “An Analytical Index of the Literary and Art Criticism of Henry James”). In 1985, Mossman completed a Masters in Divinity at the Denver Seminar. He served as Assistant Pastor at the Cornerstone Community Church in Aurora, Colorado.
Nalini V. Shetty (PhD 1966; diss: “The Fiction of Wright Morris”). Shetty published an essay, “Melville's use of the Gothic Tradition” in Studies in American literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder, Jagdish Chander, Narindar S. Pradhan, eds (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1976). Shetty may have taught in India, although we have not been able to confirm this.
Barbara June Burge (PhD 1967; diss: “Nature Erring from Itself: Identity in Shakespeare’s Tragedies”). Burge served as Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences during the academic year 68/69. She left to work with the Office of Higher Education, PA Department of Education, in Harrisburg. In 1977, she went to work as a writer for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. She became the Executive Director of the Western PA Higher Education Council in 1983 and joined the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center as a writer and editor in 1987. In this 15-year period, Burge assisted Lauren Resnick, then LRDC Director, in the production of more than 80 articles, books, book chapters, and edited volumes, including: Children’s Early Text Construction (Erlbaum, 1996); Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning: Essays on Situated Cognition (Springer-Verlag, 1997); and Joining Society: Social Interaction and Learning in Adolescence and Youth (Cambridge UP, 2004).
[Francis Christopher Cronin] Francis Christopher Cronin (PhD 1967; diss: “T.S. Eliot’s Theory of Literary Creation”). Cronin taught in the English department at Ohio University from 1966 to 2000. He was an ordained priest before entering graduate study. At Ohio U, he served as a counselor in the campus ministry, as a parish priest assigned to Christ the King University Parish, and as the director of the Catholic Student Center. Late in his career, he was involved in research on cognitive processes in writing. After his retirement, he became a priest in the Catholic diocese of Steubenville.
Brian William Connolly (PhD 1967; diss: “Knowledge and Love: Steps Toward Felicity in Thomas Traherne”). Connolly, like Cronin (above) was a Catholic priest. He taught at Xavier University until his retirement in 2003.
Joan Raphael Huber (PhD 1967; diss: “Chaucer’s Concept of Death in the Canterbury Tales”). Huber taught for many years as a non-tenure-track instructor in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh. She joined the English department at Clarion University in 1991 and taught there until her retirement in 2009. She also worked with the community poetry/writers group at the Oil City Library.
Lois Shoop Josephs (PhD 1967; diss: “A Historical and Critical Study of Diana of the Crossways by George Meredith”). Lois Josephs Fowler became a Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also served as Director of the Writing Program. She published widely on literature, writing, English education and women’s studies. With Virginia Elliott, who served as the Director of Composition in our department in the 1960s, she prepared and edited an NCTE report on English for the Academically Talented Student in the Secondary School (1969).
[Alex Newell] Alex Newell (PhD 1967; diss: “Fate In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art: A Critical Study of the Early Development”). Newell joined the English department at Concordia College, Canada. During his time in our department, he studied with the Visiting Mellon Professors L.C. Knights, Kenneth Muir, and Allardyce Nicoll. His seminar paper for Muir, “The Dramatic Context and Meaning of Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Soliloquy,” was published in PMLA and often reprinted. Newell was the author of The Soliloquies in Hamlet: The Structural Design (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1991). He was active in theater in Canada and was the author of the play White Clouds, Black Dreams.
[Eric Van Tine Ottervik] Eric Van Tine Ottervik (PhD 1967; diss: “The Multiple Novel in Contemporary British Fiction”). Ottervick taught at Lehigh University, where he eventually served as Vice Provost and Vice President for Planning. As a junior faculty member, he won the Alfred Noble Robinson Faculty Award for his service to the university.
Irving Nathan Rothman (PhD 1967; diss: “Verse Satire in the Port Folio, an Early American Magazine edited by Joseph Dennie, 1801-1812”). Rothman has had a long and distinguished career at the University of Houston, where he continues to teach. His research concerns English and American literature, but also “stylometrics” (the use of statistical analysis to determine authorship). He has published articles on Defoe in Bibliotheck, Modern [Irving Nathan Rothman] Language Review, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and Studies in the Novel. He has written on Chatterton, Pope, Swift and Fielding. He is Textual Editor and Co-General Editor of the Stoke Newington Edition of the Writing of Daniel Defoe Edition (AMS Press). In 2003, he published an edition of The Political History of the Devil (1726), co-edited with his former student R. Michael Bowerman. His two-volume edition of Defoe’s The Family Instructor was published in 2012. He has written on the poetry of an early American Federalist Magazine, The Port Folio, with essays in American Literature, Early American Literature, the Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, Revue de Litérature Comparée, and the Yale University Library Gazette. Rothman is also a member of the Jewish Studies faculty and the author of The Barber in Modern Jewish Culture: A Genre of People, Places, and Things (Mellen Press, 2008).
Kenneth Allen Seib (PhD 1967; diss: “Promise and Fulfillment: A Study of James Agee”). Seib published his dissertation, James Agee: Promise and Fulfillment, with the University of Pittsburgh Press (1968). After receiving his degree, he joined the English department at California State University, Fresno. He was the author of the controversial book, The Slow Death of Fresno State: A California Campus under Reagan and Brown (Ramparts Press, California State University, 1979). The book was originally a pamphlet published to raise awareness and to raise money in support of Fresno State English department faculty member Robert Mezey, who was fired in 1968 for his remarks on the marijuana laws.
Ford Harris Swigart (PhD 1967; diss: “A Study of the Imagery in the Gothic Romances of Ann Radcliffe”). Swigart taught until his retirement as a member of the English department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Sister Mary Josephine Beattie (PhD 1968; diss: “The Humane Medievalist: A Study of C.S. Lewis”).
Harry Edward Craig (PhD 1968; diss: "The Affirmation of the Heroes in the Novels of Saul Bellow”). Craig taught until his retirement as a member of the English department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
John Bruce DeLoche, Jr. (PhD 1968; diss: “Judgment Here: The Homiletic Art of Cyril Tourneur”). DeLoche began his career at the University of Indiana, South Bend. He left in 1970 to accept a position as Associate Professor at Monmouth College, New Jersey.
[Constance Ayers Denne]
Constance Ayers Denne (PhD 1968; diss: “Setting as Meaning in Cooper’s European Trilogy”). Denne was Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. She edited three volumes of works by James Fennimore Cooper, all with SUNY Press: Gleanings in Europe: Italy (1981); Gleanings in Europe: France (with and introduction and notes by Thomas Philbrick, 1983); and Satanstoe, or the Littlepage Manuscripts: A Tale of the Colony (1990). With Helen A. Harrison, she is the author of Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach (Chronicle Books, 2002, with a Preface by Edward Albee).
William Wirt French (PhD 1968; diss: “Some Elements of Dramatic Structure in Shakespearean and other English Renaissance Tragic Dramas”). French served as a member of the English department at West Virginia University, where he retired in 1999 as a full professor after 35 years of service. He taught Shakespeare and modern drama. He was active in the Shakespeare and Renaissance Association of West Virginia. He published essays on Shakespeare, Pound and contemporary theater. He was chosen as Maryat Lee’s literary executor, and he was the author of Maryat Lee’s EcoTheater: A Theater for the Twenty-First Century (West Virginia UP, 1998).
Donald Hobar (PhD 1968; diss: “The Oral Tradition in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur”). Hobar began his career at Waynesburg College but then joined the English department at Indiana State University. He was a co-editor of Papers on Lexicography in Honor of Warren N. Cordell (Indiana State UP, 1979).
Robert Graham Lambert (PhD 1968; diss: “The Prose of a Poet: A Critical Study of Emily Dickinson’s Letters”). Lambert taught at Western Michigan University. He published essays on the teaching of composition and journalism. He was the author of Emily Dickinson's Use of Anglo-American Legal Concepts and Vocabulary in her Poetry: Muse at the Bar (Edwin Mellen Press, 1997).
Lois Simons Lewin (PhD 1968; diss: “The Theme of Suffering in the Work of Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow”). Lewin taught at Carnegie Mellon University.
Norman N. McWhinney (PhD 1968; diss: “Sex, Time, and Laughter: A New Theory of Comedy”). McWhinney had a long career at the University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg, which now awards Norman N. McWhinney Scholarships in English Literature.
[James Gray Watson] James Gray Watson (PhD 1968; diss: “’The Snopes Dilemma’: Morality and Amorality in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy”). Watson taught English for over forty years at the University of Tulsa, where he was the Frances W. O'Hornett Professor of Literature, and a leading Faulkner scholar. At the end of his career, he was also writing on the work of Peter Mathiessen. At the University of Tulsa, he was recognized as Outstanding University Professor (1982); he earned the Certificate of Honor from the Multicultural Affairs Committee (1991) and the Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award (2002); and he was Undergraduate Research Challenge Mentor of the Year (2007). In his honor, the university has established the James G. Watson Endowed Professorship of English. He was the author of The Snopes Dilemma: Faulkner's Trilogy (U of Miami P, 1970); William Faulkner, Letters & Fictions (U of Texas P, 1987); and William Faulkner: Self-presentation and Performance (U of Texas P, 2000). He edited Thinking of Home: William Faulkner's Letters to His Mother and Father, 1918-1925 (W.W. Norton, 2000). At his death, he was working on an essay, “American Geezers.”
[Paul Geyer Zolbrod] Paul Geyer Zolbrod (PhD 1968; diss: “The Poet’s Golden World: Classical Bases for Philip Sidney’s Literary Theory”). Zolbrod taught for many years at Allegheny College, where he served as department chair and the Frederick F. Seeley Professor of English. Zolbrod was known as an influential and unforgettable teacher. In 1994, Zolbrod retired early to move to New Mexico to teach composition and the Navajo language at the Crownpoint Campus of the Diné College, an institution of higher education chartered by the Navajo nation.
In the 1970s, Zolbrod became increasingly interested in the oral poetry of the native American tradition. He spent a sabbatical year at the University of New Mexico, where he made contacts within the Navajo community and began to learn the language. Zolbrod’s most important publication was his translation of the Navajo creation myth, Diné Bahane (U of New Mexico P, 1984). His research was supported by NEH research grants in 1978-79 and 1994-96. From 1964 to 1996, Zolbrod worked as a curator with the New Mexico Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.
Between his dissertation and his work with Navajo language and culture, Zolbrod’s writing ranged over a variety of topics and genres. In the 60s, he published (with Christopher Katope) Beyond Berkeley: A Sourcebook in Student Values (World Publishing, 1966), a collection of documents from the student revolt at Berkeley set in the context of classic essays on civil disobedience. This was reworked and republished as The Rhetoric of Revolution (Macmillan, 1970). In the late 70s, he wrote a play for local production, “The Early Years: The Story of the First Fifty Years of Crawford Country,” and worked on an “oral history” of television for WQLN in Erie, PA. From the 1980s on, Zolbrod turned his attention to the Navajo and to oral traditions in poetry. Along with his translation of the Navajo creation myth, he published Sacred Texts (Newberry Library, D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, 1992); Reading the Voice: Native American Oral Poetry on the Page (U of Utah P, 1995); and Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing (with Roseann Sandoval Willink and photography by John Vavruska, U of New Mexico P, 1996). In the 1960s, Zolbrod also wrote a novel, Battle Songs: A Story of the Korean War in Four Movements. The novel was scheduled for publication by World Publishing in Cleveland but the company folder before the book could go into production. It is now available as an ebook through Amazon. Zolbrod speaks about this book and his experience in the armed services in an interview with the Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh Oral History Initiative.
Richard Francis Allen (PhD 1969; diss: “Critical Approaches to the Njals Saga”). Allen’s dissertation was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Fire and Iron: Critical Approaches to the Njals Saga (1971). Allen taught at the University of Oregon and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the son of the novelist Hervey Allen, who received his BA in our department in 1915.
[A. Carl Bredahl] A. Carl Bredahl (PhD 1969; diss: “Melville’s Angles of Vision: The Function of Shifting Perspective in the Novels of Herman Melville”). Brehdahl was a member of the University of Florida English department from 1970 to 2003. He was twice a visiting professor at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, and once a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He is the author of four books: Melville’s Angles of Vision (U of Florida P, 1972); New Ground: Western American Narrative and the Literary Canon (U of North Carolina P, 1989); Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa: Helix and Scimitar (with Susan Drake; Edwin Mellen P, 1990); and Ivan Doig (Boise State UP Western Writers Series, 1999). (Photograph courtesy of the University of Florida Archives.)
Thomas Cooke (PhD 1969; diss: “The Comic Climax in the Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux”).
[David Ellsworth Eskey] David Ellsworth Eskey (PhD 1969; diss: A Preface to the Study of Literary Style”). After receiving his PhD, Eskey spent ten years living and teaching in Baghdad, Beirut and Bankok. Eskey became Professor and Director of the TESOL program in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, where he also directed the USC American Language Institute. He was the author of many articles and chapters, and he served as the co-editor of three books on second language reading: Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading (Cambridge UP, 1988); Research in Reading in English as a Second Language (TESOL, 1987); and Second Language Reading for Academic Purposes (Prentice Hall, 1986).
Edward S. Grejda (PhD 1969; diss: “The Common Continent of Men: The Non-White Characters in the Fiction of Herman Melville”). Grejda taught at Clarion State College, where he also served as English department Chair. He published his dissertation as The Common Continent of Men: Racial Equality in the Writings of Herman Melville (Port Washington, NY; Kennikat, 1974).
Granville Hicks Jones (PhD 1969; diss: “The Jamesian Psychology of Experience: Innocent, Responsibility, and Renunciation in the Fiction of Henry James”). Jones was professor of English and American literature at Carnegie Mellon University, where he won the Ryan Award for teaching. Early in his career, he directed an experimental, student-directed, freshman English course on “the literary imagination.” Later he was involved in the MA in Professional Writing. Jones published his dissertation as Henry James’s Psychology of Experience: Innocent, Responsibility, and Renunciation (Mouton, 1975). He was also co-author, with Erwin Steinberg, of the technical report, The Evolution of a Graduate Writing Program: The Master of Arts in Professional Writing at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU Communications Design Center, 1987).
Dorothy Kish (PhD 1969; diss: “Setting In Ellen Glasgow’s Novels”). Kish taught literature for thirty years at Point Park College. From 1975-1988, she served as English department chair, revising the program in composition and developing courses in Business Writing.
Lothar Paul Krause (PhD 1969; diss: “The Conflict Between Social Communities and Individuals in the Novels of Henry Fielding”). Krause taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford.
Gabriel A. Menkin (PhD 1969; diss: “Structure in Sherwood Anderson’s Fiction”). Menkin taught at West Chester State College.
Robert Bernard Meyers (PhD 1969; diss: The Logic of Explication”). Meyers taught for 39 years at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, primarily undergraduate courses in literature, theory and criticism. He was assistant chair of the English department from 1990-97 and undergraduate coordinator for the department from 1990-96.
Leticia S. Ramirez Molter (PhD 1969; diss: “A Study of the Social Criticism in the Essays of Mark Twain”). Molter taught at Delta College, Michigan.
Joseph Charles Nucci (PhD 1969; diss; “The Poetry of Time and Place in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway”). Nucci taught at Clarion University, part of the Pennsylvania State College system.
[Elayne Antler Rapping] Elayne Antler Rapping (PhD 1969; diss: “Harmonic Patchwork: The Art of Hector St. John de Crevecoeur”). Rapping was Professor of English and Director of Women’s Studies at Robert Morris College from 1970 to 1990, Professor of Communications at Adelphi University from 1991-1998, and Professor of American Studies at SUNY Buffalo (until 2009). Rapping was a scholar of media, gender, and popular culture. She wrote for The Nation, The Village Voice, Cineaste, Jump Cut, and The Progressive, where she was a regular columnist for many years. She is the author of several books, including Processed Ideas and Packaged Dreams: The Manufacturing and Marketing of American Reality (New American Movement, 1976); The Looking Glass World of Nonfiction TV (South End Press, 1987); The Movie of the Week: Private Stories, Public Events (U of Minnesota P, 1992); Media-tions: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars (South End Press, 1994); The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-help Movement in Women’s Lives (Beacon, 1997); and Law and Justice as Seen on TV (NYU, 2003).
[Donald Thomas Reilly] Donald T. Reilly (PhD 1970; diss: “The Interplay of the Natural and the Unnatural: A Definition of the Gothic Romance”). Reilly taught for almost 40 years at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, where he served as Chair of the Humanities division, and where he was a popular teacher and much admired colleague. In 1999 he won the UPG Teaching Award. Reilly joined UPJ in its second year and played an important role in developing the English department and its majors in literature and writing. He developed the campus’s courses in pre-20th century American literature and in the European narrative. He was awarded tenure in 1971, achieving the rank of full professor in 1977.
Norman Bryan Rosenblood (PhD 1969; diss: “Some Aspects of Fielding’s Heroes”). We think Rosenblood may be the Rosenblood who taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. If so, he became active in psychoanalytic circles as both a Freudian therapist and a scholar of literature. We have not been able to confirm the connection.
Judith Ann Rosenthal (PhD 1969; diss: "The Persona in Andrew Marvell’s Lyric Poetry”). Rosenthal was involved in the early days of Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She had a long and successful career at California State University, Fresno, where she taught courses in literature, popular culture and women’s studies.
[Emanuel Leo Rubin] Emanuel Leo Rubin (PhD 1969; diss: “The English Glee from William Hayes to William Hrosley”). Although Rubin lists his PhD as a degree in musicology, we have him listed in the English department. While a student at Pitt, Rubin directed the Pitt Glee Club and played French horn with the Pittsburgh symphony. Rubin taught at Ball State (where he was Dean of the College of Fine Arts, 1983-84), the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, and Bowling Green State University in Ohio before joining the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1986, where he was Professor of Music History and Judaic Studies and active as a composer and performer until his death in 2008. Rubin was the author of The English Glee in the Reign of George III: Participatory Art Music for an Urban Society (Harmonie Park Press, 2003) and, with John Baron, Music in Jewish History and Culture (Harmonie Park Press, 2006).
Donald Aubrey Short (PhD 1969; diss: “The Concrete is Her Medium: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor”).
Barbara Hochster Solomon (PhD 1969; diss: “Conrad’s First Person Narrators: A Study in Point of View”). Solomon served as professor of English and Women's Studies and Director of Writing at Iona College. Her major academic interests were twentieth century American and world literature. She edited and wrote introductions to a long list of classroom anthologies, including The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin (Signet, 1976); The Experience of the American Woman: 30 Stories (Signet, 1978); Ain't We Got Fun?: Essays, Lyrics, and Stories of the Twenties (Signet, 1980); American Wives: 30 Short Stories by Women (Signet, 1986); Rediscoveries: American Short Stories by Women, 1832-1916 (Mentor, 1994); Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's Beloved (G.K. Hall, 1998); and, with W. Reginald Rampone, An African Quilt: 24 Modern African Stories (Signet, 2013).
Barbara Wilkie Tedford (PhD 1969; diss: “Henry James and Ivan Turgenev”). Tedfrod taught at Glenville State College (in West Virginia) for 23 years before her retirement in 1999. She published essays on American authors, including James and O’Connor.
[Ed Roberson, Andrew Welsh, Darrell Gray] Andrew Welsh (PhD 1969; diss: “Melos and Opsis”). Welsh is Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University, where he taught courses in Medieval literature and folklore for the English department and the Comparative Literature program. He has published essays on Middle Welsh, Old English and Middle English literature. His 1978 book, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton UP, 1978) won the 1978 MLA James Russell Lowell Prize and the 1978/79 Melville Cane Award of The Poetry Society of America. Work on the book was aided by a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship at Pitt in 1974/75.
Jerome Paul Whalen (PhD 1969; diss: “Some Structural Similarities in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Selected Narrative and Dramatic Works of George Bernard Shaw.) Whalen was a former Provost and the Dana Professor of English Literature at Elmira College.
[Eleanor Buntag Wymard] Eleanor Buntag Wymard (PhD 1969; diss: “J.F. Powers: His Christian Comic Vision”). Wymard is the director of Carlow University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. During her tenure at Carlow, Wymard developed the Madwomen in the Attic poetry workshops, the Women’s Studies program, the Marie Torre Lecture, The Honors Program, and the Focus on Women lecture series. She has published essays on Kate Chopin, Barbara Pym, J.F. Powers, Annie Dillard, John Irving, John Fowles and Mary Gordon. Wymard is the author of four books: Talking Steel Towns: The Women and Men of America's Steel Valley (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007); Conversations With Uncommon Women: Insights from women who've risen above life's challenges to achieve extraordinary success (AMACOM, 1999); Men On Divorce (Hay House, 1994); and Divorced Women, New Lives (Ballantine, 1990).
Francis Thomas Zbonzy (PhD 1969; diss; “The Structure of Chaucer’s ABC”).
Bert Balducci (PhD 1970) taught at American University. He is currently President of Balducci Associates.
Arthur T. Broes (PhD 1970; diss: Jonathan Swift in Finnegan’s Wake). Broes served as Professor of English and department chair at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
Diana Childress (PhD 1970). Childress is the author of the children’s book, Chaucer’s England (Shoe String Press/Linnet Books, 2000). Childress taught at the university level, wrote for textbook publishers and children’s magazines, and served as a children’s librarian.
Thomas D. Cooke (PhD 1970; diss: “The Comic Climax in the Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux”). Cooke taught at the University of Missouri. He is the author of The Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux: A Study of Their Comic Climax (U of Missouri P, 1978) and the editor of The Humor of the Fabliaux: A Collection of Critical Essay (with B.L. Honeycutt, U of Missouri P, 1974) and The Present State of Scholarship in Fourteenth-Century Literature (U of Missouri P, 1982).
Gregory Frank Goekjian (PhD 1970; diss: “The Function and Effect of Rhyme”). Goekjian is Professor Emeritus at Portland State University, where he also served as Director of Graduate Studies in the English department. He has been a Visiting Professor at Yerevan State University in Armenia and at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education in Britain. He is the author of articles on Milton, on Derrida, and on genocide.
[John H. Miller] John H. Miller (PhD 1970; diss: “Rhetoric, Theme, and Persona in the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold”). Miller was a founding faculty member of the Academy for Lifelong Learning at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum where he was Vice President of Advancement and Fellow of the Kerr Center for Chesapeake Studies. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University (where he was Development Director for the College of Humanities & Social Sciences), and as adjunct professor at American University and Washington College. Miller taught as faculty member for Semester At Sea.
[Robert F. Pack] Robert F. Pack (PhD 1970; diss: “Shelley and History: The Poet as Historian”). Pack started his career in the English department at Rutgers University, where he moved from teaching to administration, serving finally as Associate Dean of the Mason Gross School of the Arts (1979-1985) and Associate Provost for Administration and Personnel (1985-1993). In 1993, he returned to the University of Pittsburgh to join then Acting Provost Mark Nordenberg in the newly created position of Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Resources Management. Pack's responsibilities in the Provost’s Office at Pitt have included university-wide budgeting and capital planning for both academic and student life facilities and acting as liaison between Pitt's four regional campuses and the provost. In addition, Pack was responsible for implementing Pitt's new enterprise Student Information System, which won national recognition through a Computerworld award. He retired from the university in 2010.
[Silvia Ruffo-Fiore] Silvia Ruffo-Fiore (PhD 1970; diss: “Love, Fame, and Death: Three Petrarchan Themes in Donne). Ruffo-Fiore had a long and distinguished career at the University of South Florida, where she won several state and local teaching awards and the State of Florida Professional Excellence Program award in recognition of her scholarship. She specialized in classical, medieval, and early modern comparative literature and interdisciplinary literary studies, with particular emphasis on Homer, Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Machiavelli. Ruffo-Fiore’s books include Donne’s Petrarchism: A Comparative View (Grafica Toscana, 1976) and Niccolo Machiavelli (Twayne, 1982). She was awarded a $65,000 grant from the NEH for the Annotated Bibliography of Modern Scholarship on Niccolo Machiavelli (Greenwood Press, 1990).
Mary Strauss-Noll (PhD 1970) taught at Mt. Mercy College (now Carlow) and then for many years in the English department at the Penn State New Kensington Campus. Carlow College now has an endowed scholarship in her name.
Barbara Wilkie Tedford (PhD 1970; diss: “Henry James’s admiration of Ivan Turgenev: An Early Influence "ineradicably established"). Tedford retired from Glenville State College in West Virginia in 1999, where she had taught for 23 years. Prior to Glenville, she taught at Robert Morris College in Pittsburgh and Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia.
[Sylvia Joyce Barksdale]
2. 1960s BAs
[Charles Aston] Charles Aston (’67) is the curator of rare books and prints for the University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Sylvia Joyce Barksdale (’67) is Associate professor of Social Work at California University of Pennsylvania.
Vincent J. Bartolotta, Jr. (’67) is a founding partner of Thorsnes Bartolotta McGuire, a San Diego personal injury law firm.
Mary G. Bernath (BA ’68; PhD 74) taught American literature and journalism at Bloomsburg State College.
[Mary G. Bernath]
Carol Coviello Malzone (’65) is a food writer, travel consultant, and the author of Foods of Rome.
[Carol Coviello]
James Crawford (’64) is Professor emeritus of Theater and Speech at Lakeland College, Wisconsin.
Don DeCesare (’67) is a former CBS Vice President of Operations and the current president/general manager of Crossroad Communications.
Francine G. Feinerman (’69) is President & CEO of Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania's only statewide nonprofit, multi-disciplinary arts advocacy organization.
James J. Gallagher (’60) was an expert in special and gifted education. He published over 200 journal articles and 39 books, including two seminal books -- Teaching the Gifted Child and Educating Exceptional Children.
[Lee Gutkind] Lee Gutkind (’68) joined the faculty in English at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1970s and became a central figure, as a writer and a teacher, in developing the genre of Creative Nonfiction. Through his publications, and particularly his early work with the University medical center, he became a major figure nationally, dubbed the “godfather” of creative non-fiction by James Wolcott in Vanity Fair. In the department, he was tireless in his support of his students, and he played a major role in developing the nonfiction curriculum, but also the reputation and the profile of our MFA program in Creative Writing. Many students came to Pittsburgh to work with Gutkind, and many of those who did have gone on to very successful careers. With over 50 books, Gutkind himself remains a dauntingly prolific writer and editor. His publications include Many Sleepless Nights (Norton, 1988), Almost Human: Making Robots Think (Norton 2006), and You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction (DeCapo Press, 2012). His most recent edited volumes include Southern Sin: True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving badly (In Fact Books, 2014, with Beth Ann Fennelly) and True Stories, Well Told: From the First 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine (Underland Press, 2014). Gutkind’s magazine, Creative Nonfiction, commands the attention of writers inside and outside the academy.
When he was an undergraduate, Gutkind worked with Monty Culver, about whom he said: “He guided us for years for no reward except for our friendship, our loyalty and our love. He worked with us for hours.” Gutkind also maintained the legacy of Edwin Peterson. Gutkind revived Peterson’s annual Writer’s Conference, and his book, The People of Penn’s Woods West (U of Pittsburgh P, 1984) was an homage to Peterson’s Penn’s Woods West (U of Pittsburgh P, 1958). Although he never worked with Peterson, there were, Gutkind said, “certain things I will always share with him.” And among those things shared was a deep commitment to the region, to good writing, and to students. Gutkind is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes and professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.
[Harvey Kopelowitz]
Joseph Guzzardi (’64) writes a nationally syndicated column for the Lodi News-Sentinel, a daily in California's San Joaquin Valley.
Jonellen Munn Heckler ('65) is the author of several novels, including White Lies (1989) and Circumstances Unknown (1993), which was late made into the 1995 TV movie of the same title.
John Bradley Hildt (’68) served with the Peace Corps in Uganda and worked as a Vice President of Marine Midlands Bank.
[Sibyl Masquelier]
Harvey Kopelowitz (’66) has been affiliated with the Florida law firm, Kopelowitz Ostrow, since its inception.
Michael D. London (’64) is Chairman and CEO of Wall&Main, Inc, a San Francisco venture capital firm.
Paul Loukides (’61). After graduation, Loukides studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he received his MA. He taught from 1962-1999 in the English department at Albion College in Michigan. With Linda K. Fuller, Loukides is the editor of a multi-volume series, Beyond the Stars (Bowling Green University P), collections of essay on American film and popular culture. With Parley Ann Boswell, he is the editor of Reel Rituals: Ritual Occasions from Baptisms to Funerals in Hollywood Films (Bowling Green UP, 1995).
Sibyl Masquelier (’67) taught journalism at the University of Miami and worked with the Cuban Refugee Assistance Program during the 1960s and early 1970s. She was the first women hired to be a department head at The Miami Herald.
[Bill Mawhinney] Bill Mawhinney (’63). After a variety of jobs in Tucson, Arizona, including 18 years at Raytheon as facilities engineer, technical writer, newsletter editor and corporate trainer, Mawhinney retired to Show Low, Arizona. While there, he led monthly poetry circles at a local library, volunteered as a poet in elementary school classrooms, and offered poetry workshops and readings throughout the Southwest. His poems have appeared in Heron Dance, Hummingbird Review, IS Magazine, Minotaur, and Windfall. Mawhinney now lives in Port Ludlow, Washington, where he organizes and hosts the Northwind Reading Series.
[Martha Munsch] Martha Hartle Munsch (’70). Following her graduation from the Yale Law School in 1973, Munsch joined the Pittsburgh law firm, Reed Smith, one of only three women attorneys in the firm in the early 1970's. In 1976 she joined the full time faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where she was the first (and only) woman on the full time faculty at that time. After serving two and one half years as an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh, Munsch returned to Reed Smith in 1978 as a member of the Labor and Employment Law Group. She became a partner of Reed Smith in 1983, the first woman elected to partnership in Reed Smith's Pittsburgh office. Munsch has a long list of awards and honors, including membership in the American Council of Trial Lawyers. In 2011, she was appointed to the University of Pittsburgh’s Board of Trustees.
Lane Nemeth (’68) founded Pet Lane, Inc. in 2004 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Ms. Nemeth founded Discovery Toys LLC in 1978.
James P. O’Brien (’64) is a prolific and award-winning sportswriter, with many memorable columns and articles, and with over 20 books to his credit, including The Chief: Art Rooney and His Pittsburgh Steelers. In 1964, Myron Cope wrote an essay for the alumni magazine on O’Brien’s work with the Pitt News, “Will the Real Jim O’Brien Please Step Forward.”
[James P. O’Brien] Brendan W. O’Malley ('61) became the Assistant Director of the Port Department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In 1989, he left to be Director of the Port of Baltimore, a position he held for two years before leaving the government sector to accept a position with Hobelmann Port Services.
Roger Christopher Panella (’60) was a founding partner in Double R Enterprises, a company that manufactured blow-molded plastic containers, including the “little hugs” sold by Daily’s Juices in Western Pennsylvania.
Regina Rinderer (’64) taught in the English department at Delta College, Michigan.
[Ed Roberson] Ed Roberson (’70). Roberson was born and raised in Pittsburgh. His first book of poetry, When Thy King Is a Boy was published in 1970, the year of his graduation, as a volume in the Pitt Poetry Series edited by Ed Ochester and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Roberson is the author of nine volumes of verse, including Etai-eken (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (University of Iowa Press, 1995, and winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Just In: Word of Navigational Change: New and Selected Work (Talisman House, 1998), Atmosphere Conditions (Green Integer, 1999, chosen by Nathanial Mackey for the National Poetry Series Award and a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Award), City Eclogue (Atelos, 2006), The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse Press, 2009), and To See the Earth Before the End of the World, (Wesleyan University Press, 2010). Roberson’s poetry has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2004 and Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. His awards include the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Stephen Henderson Critics Award for Achievement in Literature, the Poetry Society’s 2008 Shelley Memorial Award, and an LA Times Book Award. Roberson taught for many years at Rutgers University. He now lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College and Northwestern.
Dolores Schultz (’69) was the Director of Global Training and Education for Underwriters Laboratories Inc.
[Andrew Joseph Solomon] Andrew Joseph Solomon (’67) completed his MA in our department in 1970 and his PhD in 1974. Solomon is Professor of English at the University of Tampa, where he designed and administered their program in Creative Writing. Solomon is the author of the novel Partners and the memoir, The Fourth Demand. He has published his fiction and poetry in The Atlantic, Boulevard, Creative Nonfiction and the New Orleans Review. He serves as a book critic for The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and he can be heard on National Public Radio.
George Sommer (’67) was a Vice President with Citigroup from 1973 to 2005. At the University of Pittsburgh he was a “most valuable player” in soccer and was a member of the NCAA All-American team.
[George Michael Travalio] Marianna E. Specter (’62) completed an MA from our department in 1963 and was admitted to St. Hughes College, Oxford University, to pursue a PhD. She chose to work, however, in the family business, May Stern & Co, until she took a law degree from Duquesne University Law School in 1981. For 25 years, she had a general law practice with her partner Stephen Israel at their firm, Israel & Specter in Pittsburgh.
George Michael Travalio (’60) is Professor emeritus in the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University, where he won the Ohio State University Distinguished Service Award in 2007.
3. 1960s MAs
[Gerald William Barrax] Gerald William Barrax (’69) is Professor emeritus in the English department at North Carolina State University, where he taught creative writing. Barrax has published poems in a number of magazines and journals. His books include: Another Kind of Rain (University of Pittsburgh P, 1970), An Audience of One (U of Georgia P, 1980), The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods (U of Kentucky P, 1984), Leaning Against the Sun (U of Arkansas P, 1992), and From a Person Sitting in Darkness: New and Selected Poems (LSU, 1998). Barrax is a member of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
[Bonnie Hoover Braendlin] Bonnie Hoover Braendlin (’65) is Professor emeritus in the English department at Florida State University, where she taught courses in American literature and women’s studies. She has published articles on American women’s fiction, autobiography, and Bakhtin. She served as the editor of Cultural Power/Cultural Literacy: Selected papers from the 14th Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film (University Press of Florida, 1991) and (with Hans Braendlin) Authority and Transgression in Literature and Film: Selected Papers from the Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film (Florida State UP, 1996).
[Therese C. Burson] Therese C. Burson (’66) worked as a free-lance writer for public television. With Patricia Barey, she formed the media production company Tellens to produce TV documentaries on health care, culture, and the arts. With Barey, she is the author of Julia’s Cats: Julia Child’s Life in the Company of Cats (Abrams Image, 2012).
Clarence “Jack” Denne (’60) completed his PhD in our department in 1971. He is Professor emeritus at the College of New Rochelle, where he also served as English department Chair and as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.
Christine Oliverio Godwin (’69) taught at Orange County Community College, New York.
[Arthur Goldstein] Arthur Goldstein (’70). After graduation, Goldstein studied jazz with Bill Dobbins at the Eastman School of Music and with Joe Lovano and Ken Werner at the Sandpoint Festival. He currently teaches music history at Penn State University and piano at the Music Academy. As performer, he has appeared in concerts and festivals throughout the east as soloist, chamber musician and leader of his own jazz quartet. He achieved national recognition for his soundtrack to "Magic in the Afternoon," winner of the Golden Cine award for best American documentary film of 1984. In 1998, he performed in the world premiere of Marshall Fine's "Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano" at Penn State.
Charles Gresh (’63) was a member of the English department at La Salle University, where he also served as Dean of Students. He was president of St. John's College, a preparatory school in Washington, DC, for nine years.
Theodore Harakas (BA ’59; MA ’65) taught at Baldwin Wallace College.
Eleanore C. Hibbs (’60) taught in the English department at California University of Pennsylvania. The CalU English department offers an annual Eleanore C. Hibbs award for Freshman composition.
Jane Taylor Hollman (’69) taught English at Upper St. Clair High School.
David Kaufman (’65) was a librarian with the Carnegie Library and, later, with Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
James B. King (’63) was Professor and Chair of the English department at Belmont University (Tennessee).
[Charles Wayne Kisseberth] Charles Wayne Kisseberth (’64) is Professor emeritus in the Linguistics department at the University of Illinois. With Michael Kenstowicz, he was the author of Generative Phonology: Description and Theory (Academic Press, 1979) and Topics in Phonological Theory (Academic Press, 1977).
[Edward G. Lawry] Edward G. Lawry (’67) taught in the Philosophy department at Oklahoma State University for 36 years, where a student fund has been established in his name.
Sheldon Wayne Liebman (’65) served as Chairman of the Humanities department, Wilbur Wright College of the City Colleges of Chicago.
Charles J. Marr (’69) taught at Edinboro State College.
Bonnie Shannon McMullen (’68) taught English for the colleges at Oxford University for many years. She published articles on Fitzgerald, Poe and George Eliot and contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Robert Allen Papinchak (’65) completed his PhD at Wisconsin in 1972. He taught in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh as an Instructor from 1969 to 1972, when he was promoted to Assistant Professor. He taught courses in composition and creative writing. He left Pittsburgh in 1976 to teach composition and creative writing at Boise State University, where he remained until 1989, when he moved to Seattle. Papinchak was a frequent contributor to the Seattle Times, writing book reviews and covering arts and entertainment. He is the author of Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne, 1992).
John A. Parse ( BA ’66, MA ’67) took a law degree and worked for the PA Department of Public Welfare.
[Karen R. Schnakenberg] Karen R. Schnakenberg (’69) is Emeritus Teaching Professor of Rhetoric & Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, where she taught and developed programs in professional and technical writing.
Joan R. Sherman ('66) is professor emerita of English at Rutgers University. She is author and editor of many books and essays on nineteenth-century African American poets, including Invisible Poets (U of Illinois P, 1974), African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (U of Illinois P, 1992), The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and his poetry (U of North Carolina P, 1997), and the multi-volume Collected Black Women's Poetry (Oxford, 1988).
[Shelby Stephenson] Shelby Stephenson (’67) taught literature and creative writing at Campbell College (North Carolina) and then at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke until his retirement in 2010. He was the editor of Pembroke Magazine and a poet, with several chapbooks and small press publications, including Family Matters: Homage to July, The Slave Girl (Bellday Books, 2008). Stephenson received the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Bellday Poetry Prize, the Oscar Arnold Young Award, the Brockman-Campbell Award, the Bright Hill Press Chapbook prize and the Playwright’s Fund of North Carolina Chapbook prize. He was interviewed by the Library of Congress for the series “Poet and the Poem.”
[Judith Summerfield] Judith Summerfield (’67) is Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, where she was also served Dean for Undergraduate Education, and a member of the faculty of PhD program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. Summerfield is the author of a long list of books and articles on composition and general education. Her book, with Geoffrey Summerfield, Texts and Contexts: A Contribution to the Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition (Random House, 1986) won the 1986 MLA Mina Shaughnessy Award.
Robert Trowbridge (’66) is founder and CEO of Trowbridge and Company, an executive search firm.
James William Wensyel (’65) retired from the army as a colonel. He saw combat in Korea and Vietnam. He is a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg Battlefield, and he has written books and articles on the Civil War, including Petersburgh: Out of the Trenches (Burd Street Press, 1998).
Charles G. (Terry) Zug (’65) is professor emeritus of folklore and English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Five North Carolina Folk Artists and The Traditional Pottery of North Carolina and coeditor of Arts in Earnest: North Carolina Folklife.
1960s Footnotes
MSS: Writing at the University of Pittsburgh
Through the 1960s, the department continued to publish the annual collection of student writing, MSS: Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. There was no 1969 volume in the archive, which could mean that the volume is missing from the stacks, or it could mean that the 1969 controversy surrounding student publications (and the control over student publications) brought MSS to a halt that year. (MSS had both faculty and student editors.) The collection continued to be published into the 1970s. The last volume in the archive is 1977.
In the early 1960s, Edwin Peterson and Montgomery Culver shared the role of Editor. They were assisted by George Crouch, Abe Laufe, Frederick Mayer and a regularly changing group of undergraduates. In 1965, Culver took over as a single editor. In 1967, he was assisted by Virginia Elliott, Margery Gulbransen, and Abe Laufe. The student editor was Don De Cesare. The 1967 issue began with a “Dedication” recognizing the retirements of Peterson and Mayer. The dedication reads:
The twenty-first annual issue of Mss is dedicated with the greatest respect and affection to retiring Professors Edwin L. Peterson and Frederick P. Mayer.
Inseparable from the very thought of the study of writing in Pittsburgh are the name of Edwin L. Peterson and the images that the name evokes: the brown suit, the throat-clearing at the punch-line of an anecdote, the Early American Room with its long table and secret loft, the smile and the inexhaustible cheerful and genuine concern of Professor Peterson with thousands of students in forty years….He has worked with the writing major program at Pitt since it began, and hundreds of his students have gone on to win prizes, publish articles, write for newspapers, publish short stories, write successful books. His own books—No Life so Happy and Penn’s Woods West—show his feeling for simple, evocative language and his love for the world. Late in his career he took over an entirely new project—lecturing on composition to huge audiences of freshmen with the aid of an overhead projector—and his accomplishments have been nationally publicized and imitated.
Professor Frederick P. Mayer, in his forty-five years at the University, has served as English Department chairman more than once—most recently as acting chairman in 1965-66—but has always preferred to give his time to literature and to his students. An accomplished essayist in his own right, he has tirelessly commented upon hundreds of graduate theses and dissertations and thousands of undergraduate papers; as all his students know, no one else marks a paper as thoroughly as Professor Mayer does, or offers as many helpful suggestions for its improvement. And no one else within their knowledge is likely to be as genuinely and unassumingly erudite.
Both of these men will retire in 1967; many things at the university, however—ranging from definite features of curricula and course content to less easily definable influences such as the standards, attitudes, and habits of mind of their colleagues—will perpetuate their presence.
In the 1960s, the MSS table of contents tended to feature fiction and poetry rather than nonfiction. In 1964, however, there is a collection of “freshman paragraphs.” Ed Roberson, who would go on to win many major national awards for his poetry, is published in MSS in 1961. (He received his BA from our department in 1970.) Here are some samples:
“Somewhere There’s Music,” Andrew Welsh (1961)
“Four Songs at the Coming of Winter” and “Dirge” (poems), Ed Roberson (1961)
“Freshman Paragraphs” (1964)
“Fear Gets a Base on Balls,” Andy Solomon (1966)
“Unintentional Stress,” Don De Cesare (1967)
From the 1960s to the 1970s: Faculty Recruitment and Retention
In 1959, the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust gave $12 million to the University to establish ten distinguished professorships and 50 pre-doctoral fellowships. English was one of the 10 departments chosen to receive these funds and, it was assumed, to develop a significant research profile and a distinguished graduate program. In return, there would be new faculty lines (along with new expectations for tenure and promotion).
As you would expect, with the Mellon money the graduate program grew dramatically. In the 1940s the department granted 21 PhDs; in the 1960s, 20 years later, it granted 89, more than 4 times that number.
To support the graduate program, there was aggressive hiring at all levels and the faculty size increased across the ranks. Eleven assistant professors were hired in the 1950s. Fifteen were hired in the 1960s. (Three had been hired in the 1940s.) If I tally the full faculty list by decade, there were 27 tenure track faculty in the 1940s and 50 in the 1970s.
The PhD program, as it always had been, was a program of fairly conventional literary study—period, author, and genre. With the emphasis turning to the PhD program, the study of literature became, and for the first time in our history, the center of growth, energy and visibility in the English department.
And with the large numbers of graduate teaching assistants who were added to the lower division teaching pool, the study of literature became the frame of reference for general education (including the teaching of composition) in ways (and to a degree) that were markedly different from the past. The investment in a graduate program in English Literature had substantial consequences for the curriculum, and undergraduate writing in particular.
But the first tremors of a seismic shift came when the new assistant professors began to be reviewed for promotion and tenure. The Mellon initiative dramatically changed the expectations for the research profile of the tenured and tenure track faculty, across fields. If the university were to become a leading research institution, the assistant professors needed to prove their worth though publication.
The story of tenure and promotion in the first half of the 1970s is gruesome. In the 1960s, promotion to associate professor was routine—and it came quickly, in most cases between 2-5 years after being hired. In the period from 1970 through 1977, of the 29 assistant professors up for promotion and tenure, 24 were denied, or the decision was postponed, or individuals resigned their positions and left the University. Of those denied tenure (16), all (or most all) had departmental support. The restructuring of the English department was being managed at level of the Dean and the Provost.
I came in the department in Fall 1975, and I arrived to a stunned and bitter silence on the 5th floor of the Cathedral. It took me some time to figure out the lay of the land. In my first year, a group of assistant professors, all of whom had been denied tenure or whose tenure was in question, came to my office to ask me to sign a petition insisting that Bill Coles, my new boss, be fired.
The wounds felt and inflicted divided a department that had thought of itself as an idealized, democratic commons: with shared governance and a carefully designed set of bylaws (bylaws which are still in use); with picnics, a softball team, and house parties. This is the subtext to Chris Rawson’s account of the 1960s:
Amid all the excitement and the alarums of battle, there were doubtless losses. In my first year, we could have all 25 tenure-stream department members to a party, and did. A couple of years later, the department was too big – but there were too many battle scars to make such a party attractive, anyway. Some of us younger faculty lost relations with senior people we admired. Differences in principle too quickly became personal.
Afterword
I began this project in 2005 when, as English department chair, I was told that Thomas H. McIntosh had endowed a chair in the name of Charles Crow, and that the position would be coming our way in the near future. I also knew that I would be a candidate for that position.
I had heard of Charles Crow, his name was on our reading room, but I knew almost nothing about him—and I felt I should. I arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in the Fall of 1975, after Crow had retired. He died in 1976; we never had the opportunity to meet. And so I went to the University Archives to see what I could find.
At this point, the archive consisted of paper, lots of paper--files in boxes and books on shelves--, and I felt the pull to dig in and to see what I could learn, not only about Crow and his very productive and influential career, but about its larger context, including his teachers and colleagues. In the following year, 2006, Anna Redcay, my research assistant, began to assemble materials and to outline a full history of the English department—or, more precisely, of English language and literature, its study and practice at the University of Pittsburgh from its opening days in 1787, since there was no English department at the university until 1886. There have been several research assistants since then, and the University Library system has been busy digitizing many of the materials that were (and continued to be) central to our research: chancellor’s reports, alumni magazines, course catalogs, yearbooks, photographs, collections of student writing. The online archive is a remarkable resource. You can find it at “Documenting Pitt.”
I am very grateful to the University archivists who have given me their generous assistance: Marianne Kasica and Miriam Meislik. I am grateful to Anna Redcay, who, as I noted above, first began working in the archives to gather material for this project. Anna helped to create the format for this website and wrote some of its first entries. I owe a huge debt to Jean Grace, who helped with the design of the website and who oversaw its construction. I am grateful to the research assistants who followed Anna Redcay—Tara Lockhart, Kathryn Kidd, Maria Sholtis, and Nina Sabak—and to Jesse-Burton Nicholson, Cristina Correnti, and Dara Liling, who helped to bring the project on-line. Sarah Loser and Bridget Duffy, undergraduate research assistants, helped to gather and select examples of student writing. Bridget Duffy tracked down undergraduate prize winners and helped to prepare their entries. Lauren Hall researched and prepared materials for our entries on Edwin Peterson.
For the early periods of the university, we relied heavily on Agnes Lynch Starrett’s, Through One Hundred and Fifty Years: The University of Pittsburgh (U of Pittsburgh Press, 1937). From the 1800s on, we gathered most of the materials ourselves from the archives, although for context we relied upon Robert C. Alberts, Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh, 1787-1987 (U of Pittsburgh P, 1986).
The current project ends with the 1960s. I’ve been asked why I stop there. The answer is simple. I arrived in the department in 1975. I know both too much and too little to continue on as an historian, and I’m not ready (or inclined) to be a memoirist. I have deeply enjoyed the opportunity to see my department and my profession (and my teaching and research) as part of the story made up by the cast of characters we’ve listed on these digital pages.
If you have corrections or additions, please send them to the address below. If you have documents or images, please send them as well, particularly for faculty and PhD students. We will be careful with their use and, with your permission, place them in the University Archives.
This history is dedicated to all those who have promoted the literary and rhetorical arts on our campus.
September 1, 2014
David Bartholomae
Professor and Charles Crow Chair
Department of English
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260