I first met Jean a long time ago, when I was a non-English major taking some literature courses so that I would have a better chance of admission to the English department’s MA program. Over the years, I took seminars with her, worked with her on the Committee for the Evaluation and Advancement of Teaching, and worked with her as an administrator in Composition. In these contexts, I could see how brilliant Jean was at setting up learning situations so that students engaged in real intellectual work that they defined within the parameters that she had established. She helped her students learn how scholarly work unfolds and circulates.
After I finished my MA and did all my coursework for the doctorate, I found myself out of funding. I was freelance writing for major foundations and teaching part-time at Pitt and CMU. By then, I had shelved the idea of finishing my doctorate. Jean was the director of the Composition program then, and, given my experience with professional and nonprofit writing, she invited me to help her think through an undergraduate certificate in professional writing, an idea that Professor Emeritus Dave Bartholomae was interested in as well. We soon had several other people involved in proposing the certificate and new courses. A couple of years later, the School of Arts and Sciences approved the PPW certificate, which has since grown into a major.
At around that same time, at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), I presented a paper about the history of the teaching of professional writing. Jean told me that it was good and engaging scholarship that others would find useful, and she encouraged me to think about asking to be reinstated as a graduate student so that I could complete my doctorate.
When I decided to do it, Jean advocated for me. When I wasn’t sure how to get started, she gave me specific advice to help me structure my research and make the best use of my time. When she came across useful sources, she sent them to me. As I wrote drafts of chapters, she read them and encouraged me and offered excellent (and challenging) revisionary advice. As I was finishing, she gave me editing advice that allowed me to polish the language and presentation, and she talked to me about how to frame my work for others both at my defense and beyond. From the very beginning of the process, Jean sought to understand my project, my vision for my scholarship, and she helped me create the best possible version of that project.
Jean’s focus as a reader of student work ranges from big methodological issues (what to look at, what theory to draw upon, and how to shape a book-length project) to the fine details that ultimately strengthen style and contribute to a well written book. In the last months of finishing my dissertation, I learned so much from Jean’s attention to my habits of expression—words I overused, rhetorical moves I made too often or not enough, and expressions or concepts that advanced my argument in powerful ways. It was amazing to see how small but consistent tweaks in language could shift the tone and authority of a passage of writing.
Those are my experiences, and I am just one of many who have benefitted from working with Jean. It’s no surprise that Jean won the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring in 2010. Jean has always been generous with her time and attention, offering help and support to those who ask, whether they are working on their teaching or their research. I can see why she has often ended up helping the graduate students who have had the most complicated paths to completion of the doctorate: She is open to the ways that those complicated paths can lead to good scholarship, engaged careers, excellent teaching, and thoughtful administration.
Jean has a boundless sense of the possibilities in the teaching of writing. She can imagine so many ways of creating smart, engaging writing courses that allow students to work on their writing but also expand how they see the world and how they see themselves in the world. In the same sense, she sees how to teach new teachers of writing to think about what they are doing in the classroom, to consider the choices they make and the impact of those choices on students.
Her investments in and extensive knowledge of composition studies, women’s studies, literature, and archival work have allowed her to engage effectively with complex scholarship that has roots in different fields. This is tremendously helpful to those she has worked with, both students and faculty, many of whom are also invested in pulling together insights and sources from these different areas. Jean has a sense of what others are working on in the field, what you could work on, and how all of that could inform our practice as teachers and scholars.
Jean’s scholarship has focused on composition and pedagogy, women’s studies, history of the book, and literary studies, particularly nineteenth-century American constructions of literacy and letters. With Stephen Carr and Lucille Schultz, she wrote Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), which won MLA’s 2006 Mina Shaughnessy Prize. She was textual editor of two volumes of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She has presented regularly at CCCC, MLA, NCTE, RSA, the Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, and more.
Jean’s position as co-editor of the influential Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture, published with the University of Pittsburgh Press, has allowed her to exercise her impressive editorial abilities for the benefit of the field. Drawing on her experience with this work, she can offer students and colleagues insights about the state of the field, trends in research, and specific, detailed advice about publishing—and she does so with great generosity. She has an encyclopedic memory for people’s projects and their intellectual commitments. This speaks to how seriously and generously she listens to others.
As I write, I’m thinking about the administrative roles Jean has held over her time with us and the impact she has had through those roles: Jean served as director of the Composition program twice (1999–2001 and 2013–18), and she directed the Committee for the Evaluation and Advancement of Teaching (CEAT) from 1988 through 94 and 2016 through 17. These roles have put her at the center of conversations that have not always been easy, but she always fought for a vision of what the Composition program should stand for and how it should work when we take students, student writing, and our own work seriously.
This is why so many of us have asked Jean to write letters for us, or reports, or other documents. Jean pays close attention to our teaching materials and to the possibilities of whatever it is we are doing in order to represent us to others. She has written thousands of pages of close analysis of our work—for undergrads, for graduate students, for those of us in the non-tenure stream, and for tenure-stream faculty.
Jean has advocated for the people she works with in large and small ways. Whether she is addressing a large, systemic issue or one person’s problem, Jean has done her best to make our lives more humane and our work more rewarding. This includes everything from ensuring that undergraduates get what they need out of a course to making arrangements for non-tenure stream faculty members who have had life circumstances change to thinking through how policies are enacted at the departmental or University levels.
Beyond the English department, Jean served on many, many University-level committees, boards, and councils, where she has been able to help create better conditions for University of Pittsburgh students and faculty. She also co-directed the Chancellor’s Seminar on Teaching Diversity for seven years and directed the Women’s Studies (now Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies) program from 2007 through 13. She won the Chancellor’s Diversity Award in 1999 for her service with the Faculty Diversity Seminar and in 2009 for her service on the Provost’s Advisory Committee on Women’s Concerns.
Many of us owe a lot to Jean’s belief in the integrity of our work, her support of us and our ideas, her incredibly astute reading and critique of our writing, and her willingness to speak for us. Jean sees wonderful possibilities in your project, course, program, or idea before you do. This is what makes her an amazing teacher, editor, mentor, and administrator. We deeply miss her presence in the daily life of our department but wish her a happy and exciting retirement.
—Jean Grace
Jean Grace is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, where she was one of the original designers of the Public and Professional Writing (PPW), which she directed for many years. She continues to teach for the department and currently is director of the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences Writing Institute.