The summer is typically a slower time for academics, but I get to use my letter this month to announce a changing of the guard in the English department. I’m thrilled to share that Professor Chiyuma “Chi” Elliott stepped into the role of chair of the department on July 1. The author of four books of poetry and a monograph titled The Rural Harlem Renaissance (soon out from Oxford University Press), Professor Elliott is a tested leader with a national reputation for scholarship and creative writing. She has the experience and the vision to take the department to new heights.
She shared with me some thoughts on the strengths our students have and the value they bring: “I think my colleagues are used to how talented the students are here. But as someone newer to CWRU, it still feels like a miracle when someone spontaneously asks a question in a seminar about frame tales, syntax, or the difference between alliteration and consonance. It’s easy to care about this place and to want to work hard to make it even better.”
While Chi takes over Guilford 106, I’ll be the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Academic Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences, working with Dean David Gerdes to support the careers of faculty across the college. Teaching my American Literature survey–Melville through Morrison–will keep me a frequent visitor to Guilford, and I’ll maintain my job as poetry and fiction editor of The Atlantic magazine as well.
Over the last three years, the English department has brought together many of the very best writers at work today. Our research is nationally recognized and our teaching wins university-level awards. English colleagues have leadership roles in the faculty senate, the college executive committee, the Cleveland Humanities Collaborative, the Writing Resource Center, and the Posse program. English has hired five regular faculty since July 2022 and placed the Writing Program at the center of the department, extending our reach to the six thousand undergraduates who take Academic Inquiry Seminars and Communication-Intensive Seminars. A rough back-of-the-envelope count would put our faculty book publications or acceptances at a little more than a dozen over three years. That’s not to mention cover stories for the New York Times Magazine and poems in Poetry. Graduate students have published papers in flagship journals like English Literary History, attended the Institute for World Literature at Harvard, and accepted teaching positions at Oberlin College.
Our task as an English department is to teach students to read literature, to write beautifully and clearly, and to immerse themselves in the interlocking histories of fiction, poetry, film, and journalism. Our students are trained to admire the slow and careful process of developing a style, to understand the process by which that style enters the world, and to trace the effects that the creative imagination has on others. Whenever we struggle to find our values reflected in the wider culture, our mandate becomes all the more urgent. It is then that our duty to our students takes on the vital importance of maintaining a shelter for the human conscience and a living archive of thought and feeling.