in this issue

Tribute to Martha Woodmansee/Letter from the Chair/Faculty Notes/Undergrad Internships and Travel Grants/Alumni News/In Memoriam

Martha Woodmansee

After 33 years as an esteemed faculty member at Case Western Reserve University, Martha Woodmansee, Professor of English and Law, retired at the end of the spring term (June 30, 2019). Recipient of numerous fellowships (from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation, to name a few), Martha has published a groundbreaking book on the eighteenth-century origins of our modern conception of art, four highly influential co-edited books, a translation, and over 30 articles and book chapters. She was executive director of the Society for Critical Exchange for 18 years and is the founding co-director of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property. She secured both external and internal funding to establish and run the Arts & Sciences Dissertation Seminar at CWRU, which has supported graduate students across the Humanities for over two decades. We have all benefited from Martha’s thorough historical research and theoretical acumen, and from the imaginative courses she has taught (not only at CWRU but also at Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Pittsburgh), all of which have made her a nationally and internationally respected scholar. She will leave a legacy of intellectual, pedagogical, and programmatic innovation in the department and the profession.

Tribute to Martha Woodmansee

By Kenneth Ledford
(Case Western Reserve University)

Other colleagues in literature and law will praise Martha Woodmansee’s scholarship over the decades.  I write to praise her professional and scholarly intellectual rigor and fundamental human kindness as they manifested themselves in the College of Arts & Sciences Dissertation Writing Seminar which she created, preserved, advanced, and bequeaths to the students and faculty of the College. I co-taught the Seminar with her four times and learned to model my own approach after hers.

The Dissertation Writing Seminar is entirely the product of Martha’s inspiration, imagination, and hard work. She perceived the need for a writing group to jump-start students in the small humanities PhD programs, and to sustain them in ways that their departments often lacked critical mass of student numbers to support. In the 1990s, she secured Mellon Foundation funding for a pilot, organized, and instituted the Seminar. But her most notable achievement was to secure sustained funding from the College after the Mellon grant expired. Through her tenacity and persuasiveness, she preserved the Seminar from the fate of so many initiatives in the College which spring forth with external funding and amply demonstrate their worth, but then expire with the external funds, as the College budget responds to other pressures. Martha simply would not let that happen, and her determination benefits us all.

Martha’s vision for the Dissertation Writing Seminar was always generous and flexible, seeking always to propel the student participants toward success, and embracing the PhD programs of the College broadly in order to do so. Initially focused on humanities PhD students, she not only incorporated faculty from other humanities departments to select the students and co-teach the course, but she also reached out to social science PhD programs. In doing so, she cultivated a fertile field for students-participants to imagine a spectrum of different audiences and professional writing conventions, and also to rethink their own audiences, and thus, career paths, for their research and writing.

To teach with Martha is to marvel at her combination of rigorous standards for thought, prose, argument, and evidence, combined with her commitment, kind and often tender, to the success of each student.  Her rigor could mean a swingeing critique; in toto, paragraph by paragraph, even line by line. But her kindness also meant that no one was exempt, and that the kindness permeated the rigor, regard, and respect of the critique and opened a door for students to examine their work and strengthen it. Every dissertation that proceeded from the Dissertation Writing Seminar was better for Martha’s critique, and she is tireless as an advocate for Seminar alumnae/i in their job searches and in their subsequent scholarly careers.

Martha has made clear to the faculty who remain that she expects us to continue the Dissertation Writing Seminar as part of her legacy. And she has taught us well and equipped us to do so, with her rigorous critiques ringing in our minds and her model of kindness ever before us.

Other Voices

When I joined the faculty in 2003, my advisors told me specifically to seek out Martha Woodmansee’s counsel as a mentor and as a scholar whose insistence on the interrelationships between reading, writing, theory, and practice would shape my own trajectory. I am deeply grateful for Martha’s vision in describing the Writing History and Theory concentration here at CWRU, and for the many hours of drafting we spent over the years on (too many!) proposals and visions for an approach to English Studies that integrates production and reception, reading and writing, history and future. Personally and professionally, I thank Martha for her engagement.

Kim Emmons (Case Western Reserve University)

Professor Woodmansee has had a profound effect on the direction of my scholarship and career. I took Dr. Woodmansee’s Fair Use course during the fall 2011 semester. In this class—which was made up of a mix of law students, English graduate students, and undergraduate students—Dr. Woodmansee pushed all of us to study copyright law, adaptation, and parody with a critical lens that few of us had previously applied. She allowed us to explore areas that we were interested in, and she helped us craft strong research projects. The essay I wrote for this class went on to be published in a leading journal in my field, which lead me to winning the Children’s Literature Association’s Emerging Scholar award in 2018. Professor Woodmansee not only supported my work in this class, but she also advocated for my work and cared about my progress as a student – even though she was not on my dissertation committee. As children’s literature is an emerging field, I was met with a great deal of hesitancy when I wanted to pursue a dissertation about picture books. Dr. Woodmansee never looked down on my work, and through her support, I was able to make a number of interdisciplinary connections which have transformed—and greatly improved—the scholarly contributions I am making. I am so grateful to have had such a strong role model early in my career.

Cara Byrne (Case Western Reserve University)

We are three researchers working in the field of English Literature and Culture at three different German Universites. In September 2017, we hosted a conference section on “The Value of Economic Criticism Reconsidered” in the framework of the yearly ‘Anglistentag’ in Regensburg. Given Martha Woodmansee’s expertise in this field of research, we were delighted and honoured that she accepted our invitation to give a plenary speech related to Economic Criticism—a field that she helped to establish. As co-editor and co-author of the foundational and fascinating anthology on “New Economic Criticism” (that was quoted throughout by nearly all speakers at the conference) and in view of her continuous research at the intersections of literature, culture, and economics, she proved an inspiring contributor to the interesting discussion we had. In the aftermath of the conference, we began to set up a network of mostly Germany-based scholars of English exploring methodologies of Economic Criticism. Martha’s pioneering thoughts proved an inspiration here as well. We wish you all the best, dear Martha, and thank you once again for your help and input!

Ellen Gruenkemeier (University of Hannover)
Nora Plesske (University of Magdeburg)
Joanna Rostek (University of Giessen)

Martha Woodmansee is a radical intellectual. For years she has collaborated with others, and with them built platforms to support collaborative projects, notably The Society for Critical Exchange. The university in ruins has little interest in collaboration of any sort, for how then can merit be evaluated? Martha has been deeply concerned with this problem of metrics and knowledge, as her work with Mark Osteen on the “new economic criticism” project makes clear. Together they organized and directed conferences to study the intersections of literature and economics. That’s how I first met Martha, when she invited me to participate. Literature and economics are, of course, now radically divided. The study of literature values the qualities of language and is part of the humanities, while economics is one of the social sciences, and measures value as a quantity expressed by curves of supply and demand intersecting on a chart. Many of us were curious about what we could learn by bringing these polar opposites into contact. Martha’s radical idea was to study where literature and economics intersected before each became a solitary discipline, fortified by disciplinary boundaries. She thought the intellectual energy thereby released could create a charge strong enough to short out disciplinary assumptions and explode received ideas. So it did.

I admire Martha’s work, her formidable intelligence, and equally formidable energy. It seems to me that her enthusiasm went far toward creating a force field in which all kinds of work were generated. One result was a collection of essays that she and Mark Osteen collaboratively edited titled The New Economic Criticism. I’m proud that I have an essay in the volume, but what I really value is Martha’s radical vision of intellectual work organized not according to lines on a vita, but as a collective project.

Martha’s skepticism about how value is evaluated and distributed is driven by curiosity, not cynicism. She is a person of great enthusiasm, for whom new pleasures were an occasion to celebrate. I learned to smoke this year when I was in Europe, she said, gleefully lighting a cigarette. But I’m giving it up – this last said without bitterness or resignation. Whether taking up smoking only to resign it, or analyzing the inescapable contradictions of so-called artistic autonomy and copyright law, there’s an imp of perversity that animates Martha’s undertakings. Given the bureaucratic rationalization of academic life, the contrariness of Martha’s work, especially her commitment to collaboration, runs counter to common sense. All of us who labor in the academy are in her debt, I think, for her work as the Director of the Society for Critical Exchange, and for the energies she has so liberally expended to envision and support intellectual possibility. She and I have not been in touch in a very long time, so I’m particularly happy to have this chance to say thank you, again, for your refusal to fall in line. I’m very grateful for your work on behalf of us all.

Christina Crosby (Wesleyan University)

Link to Tribute to Martha Woodmansee

Letter from the Chair

As this will be my last letter, I want to thank all of the departmental alumni and past and present faculty who have made my five years as chair as smooth as could be in such troubled times. In my first letter in this position I noted how distressed the Humanities were both locally and globally. In many respects the situation has only worsened. This last year, as many of you no doubt noticed, was a very challenging one, and I expect the next few years will present equally taxing difficulties. But one thing I have learned—we are a resilient group. It’s been a pleasure to work with and for you all. And as Zadie Smith says, “The past is always tense, the future perfect.”

Despite the turmoil, we accomplished a great deal in 2018-19. We saw a fifth consecutive year of growth in declared majors and credit hours taught in ENGL courses. Our literature, film, and creative-writing programs are on very sure footing, and we are planning to add a journalism minor. Participation of our Lecturers in SAGES, Engineering, and English as a Second Language continues to be a crucial component of our curricular efforts at the University. Our Colloquium series has again expanded, hosting exciting speakers—such as Jesse Sheidlower, former Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary, and poet Toi Derricotte—and drawing larger and larger audiences. Eight of our majors received funding through the Tim O’Brien English Scholarships for Unpaid Internships for summer jobs ranging from working as a stage management intern for Cain Park to tutoring at a juvenile corrections facility. Guilford House was, in other words, a center of lively teaching, creativity, and critical engagement.

Our second home, Bellflower Hall, continues to blossom as the site of the Writing Resource Center and as the location of Writers House (our university-wide hub centered on the act of writing in all its variety), both of which are crucial parts of our departmental identity. This fall, we’re continuing to schedule events that are student-focused, including several creative writing workshops (the first of which is about writing the persona poem), as well as those welcoming community attendance, in particular “Black Women Writing Cleveland” which will be co-sponsored by the South Euclid/Lyndhurst Library. Our occupation of the entire building is now complete, as the offices on the third floor are finally habitable.

And, as always, there is our academic productivity: in 2018-19 four of us published books (Thrity Umrigar’s The Secrets Between Us, and Maggie Vinter’s Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage were single-author works while Joshua Hoeynck’s Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences and Brad Ricca’s The Artificial Man and Other Stories were edited collections). We have at least four more books pending this year. Collectively, over the last 12 months we published more than 30 essays, short stories, and works of poetry and drama with publishers such as The New Yorker, ELH, Poetry, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Paradoxa, Jewish Culture and History, Public Medievalist, Ariel, Shakespeare, and the Shakespeare Bulletin. We gave over 40 presentations at institutions and conferences ranging from the CEA, ALA, MLA, ASECS, MELUS, the Modernist Studies Association, the Asian EFL Journal, the University of Michigan, the National University of Ireland, and Colby College. It was an especially good year for awards and prizes: Michael Clune received a Guggenheim Fellowship; Kim Emmons the CWRU Outstanding Faculty Award for Student Development; Sarah Gridley the Green Rose Prize and The Emily Dickinson Award; and Maggie Vinter the Diekhoff Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching. Michael Householder and Martha Schaffer were named Freedman Faculty Fellows, Eric Chilton and Kristine Kelly received the SAGES Excellence in Writing Instruction Award, and Anthony Wexler The WRC Excellence in Consulting Award. Leah Davydov, Philip Derbesy, Daniel Lutrull, Melissa Pompili, Camila Ring, and Brita Thielen won either Adrian-Salomon Fellowships or Timothy Calhoun Prizes, and Daniel Lutrull was the recipient of the 2018 Neil MacIntyre Prize.

As another well-known writer says, “What’s past is prologue.”

–Christopher Flint