A Year in Review 2014 2014--2015 Harvard English Graduate Program SUMMER 2015 | VOLUME IV
A Message from the Interim DGS In December, Martin Puchner’s distinguished service as Director of Graduate Studies was cut short by his appointment as founding chair of Harvard’s concentration on theater, dance, and media; the new concentration’s gain is the English graduate program’s loss. Stepping in as Interim DGS, I was lucky to be shown the ropes by Gwen UrdangBrown, who continues to advise faculty and staff colleagues as judiciously as she counsels graduate students. Thanks must be extended as well to Alex Koktsidis who has been assisting the graduate program with skill and enthusiasm throughout the year; in particular, Alex learned in record time to handle the highly complex and sometimes opaque admissions process. Across the profession, this year was marked by a dismal job market, or lack thereof. Faced with that challenge, Deidre Lynch and Derek Miller brought energy and imagination to bear on graduate placement, crafting a guide to the presentation of work in digital humanities and helping students think about careers both within and beyond college English departments Taking a longer view, Marjorie Garber and Stephen Tardif launched third-year graduate students on their professional careers in the Teaching Colloquium. As inaugural Lead Colloquium Coordinator, Maria Devlin helped graduate-run seminars in individual fields work more closely together, notably in a spring semester Teaching Workshop where faculty, teaching fellows and librarians engaged in lively discussion of pedagogical innovations. Maria also helped lead the way in organizing the very successful symposium, “Evidence: Questions of Methodology in Literary Studies”, which was conceived and organized by English graduate students, with a lecture delivered by Prof. Jonathan Culler, in a plenary address entitled "Lyric Evidence.” This spring was marked by growing engagement with the digital humanities on a number of fronts. Events included talks and workshops by Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, and Dan Shore, PhD ’08, as well as a semester-long group led by Prof. Derek Miller that explored text analysis using the Python programming language, and a project on ECCO led by Prof. Stephen Osadetz; and an expansion of the cross-departmental Digital Teaching Fellow initiative which enhanced the digital toolkits of undergraduates as well as of their teaching fellows and professors. Looking ahead, in order to help our students compete on an increasingly tight job market, the department voted to require future cohorts of English department students to submit an article to a scholarly journal by the end of their 5th year. At the same time, in order to support our students’ intellectual and professional development, as well as the need to publish, the department voted to establish a writing workshop, which will be inaugurated this coming year by Amanda Claybaugh, with special attention to crafting journal articles based on seminar papers or dissertation chapters. I am also pleased to report that the department voted to add Old English to the list of languages ordinarily accepted to fulfill a language requirement. And last but not least, the generosity of current graduate students who hosted newly admitted students helped us attract an incoming class of eight brilliant scholars. We look forward to seeing them in September, when Deidre Lynch will welcome them as incoming DGS. Until then, happy reading and writing— Leah Price, Interim DGS (Spring 2015)
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