Professor Nicholas Coles is retiring after a 40-year run as a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. To those that know him well, cognitive dissonance surely sets in at this number—Nick can’t have been here that long; he’s much too fresh and energetic, too unlike the stodgy image of an Emeritus Professor of English whose education began in British private schools and later at Oxford. He dresses like a lumberjack, for heaven’s sake, and he plays guitar in a band. He has an earring, and he has at least considered getting a tattoo. Nick Coles is cool.
What people may not know is that Professor Coles’ work is foundational. He earned his PhD in 1981 with a dissertation on working-class literature. This was before Paul Lauter’s 1982 field-defining article, “Working Class Women’s Literature: An Introduction to Study,” which many scholars cite as the unofficial birth of working-class studies. Nick was also a formative member and past president of the Working-Class Studies Association, an academic body with global membership, annual conferences, and a peer-reviewed journal to its credit. The Anthology of American Working-Class Literature (Oxford UP, 2006), which Nick co-edited with Janet Zandy, is the only textbook of its kind, and is widely used in college classrooms. I use it in my own classes. In these ways, he has made profound contributions to the academy, though, knowing him, I doubt he would claim his role as such. He also studied and published work in the early years of Composition Studies, drawing on his interest in the working classes to research and publish on working-class writers both in the academy and at other sites of writing and learning.
Perhaps more unexpectedly, Nick has a background in early childhood and special education. In the late 1970s, he taught music and art to children in Boulder, Colo., and was a special education aide. This history appears to have spurred his commitment to teaching young people over the years, and that it is still featured on his CV after all these years shows its importance to him. Likewise, his CV not only lists 40 years of publications, conference talks, and courses taught at the university level, but also tallies an overflow of presentations on writing to young people and their teachers across Western Pennsylvania. This is all in addition to years of professional service to organizations like the Pittsburgh Fund for Arts Education, the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, the National Writing Project, and the Peabody High School Writers Workshop. As a practicing Quaker, he has even taught Sunday School at the Pittsburgh Friends Meeting. What a great indication of Nick’s lifelong devotion to the art of teaching, and to students.
Of course, I am biased. Nick was an important mentor to me from the very beginning of my matriculation as a PhD student at Pitt, and his guidance, encouragement, and critique of my ideas and work have been invaluable to my intellectual growth. I know anyone can say these words about nearly any teacher, though, but I don’t want to suggest that his impact is so predictable as to warrant a tribute that is interchangeable with another’s. Perhaps those of you reading this will allow me to pull away from academic propriety for a moment, so that I can compliment Nick more honestly.
As a beginning graduate student, I became quickly resigned to my own stupidity. I made it through my undergraduate studies with great success, but the courses I took in my first year as a Master’s student convinced me that I very much knew nothing and needed to mask my ignorance. Working-class academics, of which there are increasing numbers, are extremely susceptible to Imposter Syndrome. So much of the function of the university assumes middle- and upper-class experience. When students in higher education come from the working and poverty classes, we genuinely do not know things that a lot of our classmates know, nor have we had access to many of the 
places and ideas our peers know well. This is not, for this tribute, a political complaint; I say this to point out that Professor Coles was among the first faculty members at Pitt to acknowledge the particular gifts of graduate students whose backstories involve economic struggle and exclusion. Importantly, he also did so while recognizing how race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and other factors intersect with class. In addition, he was among the first, if not only, to put these issues and perspectives at the forefront of his pedagogy. This is why I asked him to be a co-chair of the committee for my dissertation, The (Class) Struggle is Real(ly Queer): A Bilateral Intervention into Working Class Studies and Queer Theory.
Nick is not a showman in the classroom. In fact, he seems quite pleased to disappear in a class discussion, asking open-ended questions and only occasionally angling the class back to the text at hand. He listens to his students and responds slowly to their arguments and points of view. Though it has been some years since I have his student, I remember very distinctly feeling that he was not a selfish listener—that is, he was not waiting for students to express points of view he expected or agreed with. While his classes were properly rigorous, discussions in his classroom were more casual than in others. As students, we could be less performative as academics-in-training, which made it more possible to be curious and to learn from our peers. Professor Coles’ pedagogy taught me that it is possible to blunder in front of my academic peers and live through it—that I might perhaps even benefit from working through being wrong in public. This model is priceless to me in my own teaching and with my own students. It would surprise me if my classmates from those days did not feel similarly. The even greater testament to the impact of Nick’s teaching on my life is that I stopped being as certain of my intellectual imposture; I became a more engaged PhD student, then instructor, and I plugged myself more openly into a network of friends and colleagues at Pitt whom I still cherish.
I am sorry that incoming students at Pitt will not have as much opportunity to learn from and with Nick. Selfishly, I can boast that he is my friend as well as a mentor. When the pandemic ends and we can see one another again, I know that Nick and I will get together for a coffee (he’ll order a half-caff or a tea, I’ll order a large black coffee), and we will talk about all the new connections we have made, the work we have done, and what’s next. Though he is retiring, I have no doubt that there will be a great many next things for him. In the meantime, I congratulate him on 40 years as a professor of English at Pitt and on his well-earned retirement. Here’s to Nick.
—Katherine Kidd
Katherine Kidd is currently an assistant teaching professor and English Studies coordinator in the English and Textual Studies department at Syracuse University. Prior to this, she taught at University of Pittsburgh for nearly a decade. With a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, science fiction, television, and digital media, she specializes in American studies, working-class studies, queer studies, and television and pop culture studies. She’s passionate about teaching, Star Trek, family and friendship, and her little dog, Orlando.