1960s Faculty

Visiting Mellon Professors

In 1959, the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust gave $12 million to the University to establish ten distinguished professorships and 50 pre-doctoral fellowships. The English department was named as a recipient. In the 1960s, the department used the funds to bring in Visiting Mellon Professors. All were invited to teach graduate seminars, courses for undergraduates, and to present lectures to the university community. In the 1960s, the Visiting Mellon Professors were:

L.C. Knights (1961/1962). Knights was the Winterstoke Professor of English at Bristol University, England, and later the King Edward VII Professor of English literature at Cambridge (1965-1973). He was an editor of Scrutiny and a distinguished critic and scholar. In the 1960s, he published An Approach to Hamlet (Stanford, 1961), Shakespeare: The Histories (Longmans, 1965), and Further Explorations (Stanford, 1965). In 1976, he published Explorations 3 with the University of Pittsburgh Press.  

Kenneth Muir (1962/1963; 1963/1964). Muir was the King Alfred Professor of English Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Liverpool. Like Knights, he was a distinguished scholar of the English renaissance. Muir provided an essay for the Charles Crow festschrift, Shakespeare’s Late Plays (1974).

Allardyce Nicoll (1964/65; Spring 1966). Nicoll was a drama historian at Birmingham University, director of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford, and editor of Shakespeare Survey.

James R. Sutherland (1965/66). Sutherland was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, University of London. He worked on English literature of the 17^th  and 18^th centuries.  

L.C. Knights returned as a Visiting Mellon Professor in 1966/67. Knights provided an essay for the Charles Crow festschrift, Shakespeare’s Late Plays (1974).

William Matthews (1967/1968). Matthews was Professor of English at UCLA, Director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the principal editor of the definitive edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys.     

John Crow  (1968/1969?) From Richard Tobias: “We also had one term, a visiting scholar from Britain, John Crow, a remarkable man who was interested in Shakespeare, boxers, and cooking.  At one faculty meeting, the two Crow gentlemen [John Crow and Charles Crow] were sitting side by side so that I could shout to the medievalist, Markman, “Look, the Twa Corbies.” One seldom gets to play such a hand.”

Warner G. Rice (1969/1970). Rice was Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He was formerly the Director of the University Library and Chair of the Michigan English department. Rice was a distinguished Miltonist and was on campus at the time of the founding of Milton Studies.    

Retirements, Faculty of Long Standing

Ford Elmore Curtis, Professor. Curtis retired in 1960. With his wife, he had created an extensive collection of theater playbills, reviews, photographs, clippings and memorabilia documenting the history of theater in New York and Pittsburgh from the 1840s to the 1960s. The Ford E. and Harriet R. Curtis Theatre Collection is now housed at the Hillman Library.

Edwin L. Peterson, Professor. In 1960, Peterson served as a visiting professor and Director of the Short Story Program at the University of Colorado. In 1962 he won a Distinguished Service to Journalism award from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania. He retired in 1968.  

Throughout his tenure in the 1960s, however, he continued to play a major role in support of composition and creative writing, and he continued to be much in the national news. Peterson was known for the success of the writers who passed through his workshops, intense and heated meetings in the Early American classroom which served as his office. In the early 1960s, however, Peterson began to teach composition through large lectures, 200 students at a time, assisted by a “magic lantern,” an overhead projector. 

He developed transparencies and overlays to present writing samples and then to highlight features for discussion. The slides included student themes, which he would edit with a grease pencil. With a projected image, large numbers of students could read, discuss, and edit the same text at the same time. Peterson said, “I have to see a manuscript to tell whether it is any good. Yet for all these years, writing teachers—myself included—have been trying to tell students about writing. It is no wonder it hasn’t worked.”

This project brought new national attention to the department. In 1962, Peterson won a $23,000 grant from the U.S. Office of Education to adapt this new system for use across U.S. university campuses. In 1963, the system was published and marketed nationally by Science Research Associates, in Chicago, along with a new textbook, Contemporary Composition, co-authored with Robert Lumsden from the Evanston Township High School and Northwestern University. The “magic lantern” course was presented at a special session of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. 

Peterson retired after 41 years of teaching. He had joined the faculty as a graduate assistant in 1927. To honor his retirement, the alumni magazine asked Peterson to “roll a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter and put down whatever random thought came to him, reflecting on almost a half century of helping young men and women express their own thoughts. This was published under the title, “Why Don’t Students See Orion?” In style and thought, the essay is very much in line with Percival Hunt’s The Gift of the Unicorn.” Peterson’s comments are presented by short, numbered, aphoristic sections, called “Notions.” Notion #1 reads:

Often I am shocked to realize that many of my students never see the heavens. They live in cities or in heavily populated suburbs, and the streetlights blind them to the stars. Mention Orion to most students, and they look at you in bewilderment. They have read about the Great Dipper, some of them, but they have never lain on the top of a hill and watched the constellation move about the North Star. Strange world that wants to put a man on the moon but that cannot look at the stars!

Professors

W. George Crouch, Professor. Crouch continued to serve as department chair through 1965-66, when he was appointed Secretary of the University and Secretary of the Board of Trustees.  

Putnam Fennell Jones, Professor. Jones served as Dean of the Graduate School. Robert Alberts, in his history of the university, quotes Jones in 1962 giving this assessment of the Litchfield era: “The trouble at Pitt has been that, until a few years ago, Pitt was just about cut off from the scholarly world where reputations are made. The big change is that Pitt has now joined the scholarly world.”

Charles H. Peake, Professor. In 1961 Peake’s title changed from Assistant Chancellor for Student Affairs to Vice Chancellor for the Academic Disciplines. Peake was one of three Vice Chancellors; the others were Vice Chancellor for the Professions and Vice Chancellor for Finance. In 1968, Peake was appointed Provost, which meant that he was in charge of all academic units except the Health Professions. During his tenure as Vice Chancellor and Provost, Peake guided most of the senior appointments during the Litchfield administration and played a role in the institution’s growth in stature as a center for research.  It was Peake, for example, who led the recruitment that brought Adolf Grunbaum as the Mellon Professor of Philosophy.   

Robert F. Whitman (PhD, Harvard 1956). Robert Whitman joined the department as an Assistant Professor in 1960. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1966 and Professor in 1967, when he was also appointed English department Chair. Whitman’s specialty was drama. He published articles on Shelley (The Cenci), O’Neill, Webster, and Shaw. He was the author of three books: The Play-Reader’s Handbook (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); Beyond Melancholy: John Webster and the Tragedy of Darkness (Salzburg, Inst. Fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1973), and Shaw and the Play of Ideas (Cornell, 1977). 

Lawrence Lee, Professor. In 1963, Lee published “The Present Status of Tragedy” in the journal, The Classical World (May 1963). In the decade of the 1960s, Lee also published three books of verse, two with Boxwood, a small press located in Pittsburgh and edited by Ralph Buchsbaum, Professor of Zoology at the university: The American as Faust: A Dramatic Poem (Boxwood, 1965); The Voice of the Furies (Boxwood, 1969); and The Cretan Flute and Other Poems (Dolmen Press, 1968). Lee also edited a collection of poetry, some written by current and former students, Cathedral Poets I (Boxwood, 1966). In 1976, his poem The Cathedral, hand carved in slate, was mounted on the wall of the Cathedral of Learning commons room, near room 123. The poem was commissioned by Pitt’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and written in 1966. Here is its opening stanza:

In 1962, Lee publically charged the Litchfield administration with conduct that threated the “academic integrity” of the university. The charges included the difficulties presented by class size, the new trimester system, and a general failure to devote resources to undergraduate education. (In the 60s, the University faced serious financial difficulties, difficulties that led Litchfield to negotiate with Harrisburg for the 1966 bail-out that resulted in Pitt’s status as a “state-related” institution.) Litchfield created a committee of seven professors to consider the charges. The committee included Adolf Grunbaum, the Mellon Professor of Philosophy, faculty members from the Schools of Business and Law, and the chairs of Political Science and Physics. Their report concluded, “Each of the issues he raised has been reduced essentially to divergent understanding, hurt feelings, reasonable human failures or goals out of harmony with institutional objectives.” Lee retired in 1973.  

Charles Crow, Professor. Charles Crow began teaching in the English department as a graduate student in 1931. He had a long record of successful undergraduate teaching. As the graduate program in English grew in the 1950s, and then quite dramatically in the 1960s, Crow became one of the most sought after MA and PhD dissertation advisors. One of his students, Peggy Knapp, said:

I was a graduate student in the early 1960s when I took courses from Charles Crow. At this time PhD candidates were still required to prepare for the profession by studying and taking exams in all the major periods and authors. Professor Crow taught a wide range of periods, authors, and genres and was widely admired in the English Department for both the breadth and depth of his learning. His breadth suggested a phrase like “man of learning,” which was high praise at the time, but sounds amateurish now. There was nothing amateurish about Crow’s erudition, though, except perhaps his love of learning; it was crisp and rigorous. In particular, he was ahead of his time in raising with his students issues that would soon become the stuff of “literary theory.”

In 1970, Crow was honored as a “Distinguished Service Professor.” In his letter of support, Robert Whitman wrote:

For years, his undergraduate courses were the most popular of the department’s offerings. Generations of graduate students have worshipped Charles—and I use that extravagant term advisedly, for they found in him the model of a stimulating and provocative scholar-teacher. While he may not be what is known as a “publishing scholar”…, I find that Charles is nevertheless widely known and respected throughout the country and even abroad.  I know that several of our most eminent Mellon Professors acknowledge his mastership in the area of Shakespearean criticism; and all of us who have heard him lecture recognize the extraordinarily broad learning and the profound mind. 

Crow retired in 1973. In the introduction to a festschrift offered to Crow on his retirement, Richard Tobias also noted the range of Crow’s reading and teaching. He said that while many professors concentrate on a figure or period, enacting “a concentration that the academic community admires”:

Crow, on the other hand, has taught American literature, criticism, Milton, and Shakespeare. He offered seminars recently on John Dryden, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Browning. He taught for three years a sophomore Introduction to Poetry course so successfully that rising enrollments drove him away. His committee wrote a fifty-five page syllabus for a freshman writing course designed to make college writing a cultural experience rather than an exercise to be endured. Crow is the first to know the new Russian novel, the last French critic, or a fresh recording of an opera. From the early 1930s until now Crow is a man thinking in a time when thought seems a commodity snatched from sick hurry. His lectures were of uncommonly high caliber because he brought so much to his classes. 

In 2007, the University received a gift of $1.5 million to endow the Charles Crow Chair in English. The donor was Thomas H. McIntosh, a 1948 graduate of the School of Liberal Arts. McIntosh was not an English major; he went on to earn a JD from Michigan in 1951 and then to a long and successful career with H.J. Heinz. The gift, McIntosh said, was in honor of a “memorable and valuable teacher, whose guidance to me as a freshman composition student was much appreciated then and later in my career.”  

It is surely rare that a gift of this size is given in honor of a composition course and its teacher. Charles Crow earned his BA, MA and PhD from our department. Crow shaped and was shaped by a tradition of teaching that has a long and rich history in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Abe Laufe was promoted to Professor in 1967. He retired in 1971. Laufe published short pieces in popular magazines, like Women’s Day and Ladies Home Companion. He was a popular lecturer and entertainer. He was also a scholar of American theater. In the 1960s he published two books, often cited in his field: Anatomy of a Hit:  Long Run Plays on Broadway from 1900 to the Present Day (Hawthorne Books, 1966) and Broadway’s Greatest Musicals (Funk and Wagnall’s, 1969). He also completed an edited collection of letters, Army Doctor’s Wife on the Frontier: Letters from Alaska and the Far West, 1874-1878 (Pittsburgh, 1962; preliminary editing by Russell J. Ferguson). In 1978, he published The Wicked Stage: A History of Theater Censorship and Harassment in the United States (Ungar). Laufe regularly taught courses in composition and assisted Peterson on the “magic lantern” lecture course. 

Dorothy Miller was promoted to Professor in 1969. In 1965, Miller received a $35,000 grant for a National Defense Education Act English Institute, cosponsored with School of Education. The institute was a summer program for 40 high school teachers across the nation. The other instructors were Edward Anthony (Linguistics), Abe Laufe, and Edwin Peterson.

Frank Whittemore Wadsworth (PhD Princeton) was appointed as Professor in 1962, and he served as the first Dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Division of Humanities. Before his appointment, Wadsworth had taught at UCLA. He had been a Guggenhiem Fellow at the University of London’s Folger Library. His research areas included 16^th and 17^th century British literature. He was best known for his book, The Poacher from Stratford:  A Partial Account of the Controversy Over the Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays (California UP, 1958). Wadsworth left Pittsburgh in 1968 to become Academic Vice-President at the State University of New York’s new Purchase campus, where both a fellowship program and a student drama award now carry his name.

Walter Evert  (PhD Princeton). In 1964, Evert was hired as an Associate Professor and to serve as Associate Dean, Division of the Humanities. Like Wadsworth, Evert had been on the faculty at UCLA; he had previously taught at Princeton and Williams. He was promoted to Professor in 1967. Evert was the author of Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton, 1965) and Approaches to Teaching Keats’s Poetry (MLA, 1991).  

Alexander Welsh  (PhD Harvard) was hired at the rank of Professor in 1967. He left in the early 1970s for UCLA, and he joined the faculty at Yale in 1991, where he was the Emily Sanford Professor of English. In 1971, he published The City of Dickens (Oxford). From 1975 to 1981, he was the editor of the journal, Nineteenth Century Fiction.  

Thomas Philbrick (PhD Harvard) was appointed as an Associate Professor in 1962; he was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1967. He was the author of James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Harvard, 1961) and St. John de Crèvecoeur (Twayne, 1970). He later edited works by Cooper, Richard Henry Dana, Joshua Slocum and Michael Scott. With his son, Nathaniel Philbrick (2000 National Book Award winner for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex), Philbrick was the editor of The Mayflower Papers: Selected Writings of Colonial New England (Penguin, 2007). Philbrick had a stack of Sunfish sailboats stored in his front yard waiting for the racing season; he raced them at the highest national level, usually winning.    

Alan Markman was promoted to Associate Professor in 1960 and Professor in 1966. He died in 1970 at 52. Many thought that he would be the next department chair. Markman was a medievalist who taught courses in the history of the English language. In 1966, he won an IBM grant with Nuel Belnap in the Philosophy department to develop and teach a new course, “Application of Computer Techniques to Humanities Research.” He was the coauthor, with Barnet Kottler, of A Computer Concordance to Five Middle English Poems (Pittsburgh 1966). From 1967 to 1969, he served as senior staff in an English Language Institute project in Bangkok, Thailand, under dual funding from the University of Pittsburgh and the Rockefeller Foundation. With Erwin Steinberg (at CMU), he published a textbook for courses in the history of the language, English Then and Now: Readings and Exercises (Random House, 1970), revised as Exercises in the History of English (University Press of America, 1983).  

Robert L. Gale was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1961 and Professor in 1966. He retired in 1987. From the mid-60s to the mid-70s, Gale was the department’s Director of Graduate Studies. In the 1960s, he published articles on Willa Cather and Henry James and three books:  Plots and Characters in the Fiction of Henry James (Archon), Thomas Crawford: American Sculptor (U of Pittsburgh P), and The Caught Image: Figurative Language in the Fiction of Henry James (U of North Carolina P). Gale is still active as a scholar at the time of this writing (2014); he has had a remarkably productive career, including articles on a wide variety of topics in American literature and over 30 books, the most recent of which are Characters and Plots In James Welch’s Novels (Word Association, 2014), Characters and Plots in the Fiction of Kate Chopin (McFarland, 2014) and a reissue of The Caught Image:  Figurative Language in the Fiction of Henry James (U of North Carolina, 2012). Gale published several volumes in the McFarland series, Plots and Characters, and with the McFarland Author Encyclopedias--most recently, Characters and Plots in the Fiction of J.M. Cain (2011) and the Edwin Arlington Robinson Encyclopedia (2011). Gale published several books with the Greenwood Companions series, most recently the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion (2003); several with the Twayne United States Authors series, most recently Louis L’Amour (1992); and several with the Boise State University Western Authors series, most recently Matt Braun (1990). These books have won Gale a broad and varied and enthusiastic audience.   

Richard Tobias was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1966 and Professor in 1969. Tobias (known as Tob) died in 2006, at 81, in his 54^th year of teaching, 49 of them at the University of Pittsburgh. Tobias was a legend among his students and a good friend and mentor to his colleagues.  He served for over 40 years with the University Senate, including two terms as President. He was active with the Anti-Discrimination Committee when the University granted health benefits to same sex partners in 2005. He was a strong advocate for academic freedom. He had resigned from the University of Colorado when the faculty were required to sign a McCarthy-era loyalty oath. He served from 1960-1981 on the Senate Tenure and Academic Freedom committee. Tobias was Dean for the 1985 voyage of Semester at Sea, and he was invited as a Visiting Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge University, in 1989. At his death, he endowed two Richard C. and Barbara N. Tobias graduate student fellowships. 

 At his memorial service, the English department chair, David Bartholomae, said

We will remember him as an exuberant and passionate scholar, writer and teacher. He taught courses on the Victorians, on Shakespeare, on modern poetry and on comedy. Tob was always in mid-thought, always ready to tell you what he was reading, what he was writing, and what his students were doing — often in a single sentence and always in his strong and resonant voice. He was quick with a joke or a song, a bit of verse or a line from a favorite novel.

Tobias was the author of The Art of James Thurber (Ohio State UP, 1969) and T.E. Brown: The Manx Poet (Twayne, 1970); he was the editor of Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow (U of Pittsburgh Press, 1974) and (with his wife, Barbara) Bibliographies of Studies in Victorian Literature: 1975-1984 (AMS, 1991). He was a charter member of the editorial board of Victorian Poetry and he helped to prepare the annual bibliography for Victorian Studies from 1959 to 1994, editing the process from 1975-1984. At his death, he was working on a biography of the late-Victorian novelist Rhoda Broughton.   

Associate Professors

Richard C. Snyder was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1969.  He retired in 1978 for health problems that included severely restricted eyesight. With Kathleen D. Byrne, Snyder published Chrysalis: Willa Cather in Pittsburgh, 1896-1906 (Historical Society Of Western Pennsylvania, 1980).

Gerd Fraenkel (PhD Indiana) was hired as an Associate Professor in 1962 and was gone from the department lists by 1967. Fraenkel was a linguist, author of two textbooks, New Aspects of Language (Ginn & Co, 1964) and Languages of the World (Ginn & Co, 1967). He worked on issues related to Esperanto and simplified spelling. He was hired to organize a new interdisciplinary Linguistics Program, and he served as the Chair of the Interdisciplinary Committee on Linguistics. In 1964, the University announced the formation of a new Department of General Linguistics. Edward Anthony, Director of the University of Michigan’s English Language Institute, was recruited as Chair. Although Fraenkel was clearly by-passed for this position, he was given an appointment in the new department. In 1967, Fraenkel left to teach at the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville.  The Gerd Fraenkel papers are held at Vanderbilt University.

Myron Taube (PhD, NYU). Trained as a Victorianist, Taube taught fiction and was a central figure in the Writing Program in the 1970s and 80s. In 1966, Taube was recruited from Kutztown State College to serve as a Visiting Associate Professor and to teach courses in fiction writing. The department was still struggling to staff writing courses after Emily Irvine’s retirement in 1964. In 1969, Taube joined the regular faculty as a tenured Associate Professor. He was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1974. He published essays on Thackeray, Joyce, and Defoe and short stories in a wide variety of literary magazines, including “The Investigation” in the North Atlantic Review (Spring, 1971). At his retirement, he endowed a Myron Taube Fiction Prize for undergraduate writing majors.   

Montgomery Culver was promoted to Associate rank in 1962 and Professor in 1971. Culver served as Director of the Writing program until 1978, when Ed Ochester was appointed to that position. Culver was a short story writer; in the 1960s he published “Lousy Luck” with Esquire (1962) and “The Chance of a Lifetime” with the Saturday Evening Post (1966). Culver was quiet and shy, not someone you would single out as an important presence.   And yet he was—both in the department (as an advocate for the Writing Program) and for his students. Lee Gutkind and Andrew Welsh, both students in the 1960s, recall Culver’s work with student manuscripts. Gutkind said, “He was so smart—he knew how to take a pencil to a manuscript and help you on a one-to-one basis in that way.” Welsh, after reviewing some old assignments he had written, said   

You can hear Monty’s voice pushing, pulling, pleading for clean writing, accurate writing, fresh writing—for prose that sees things honestly, that hears things truly, that moves with the rhythms of something alive, and not dead. It’s impossible to calculate how important those weekly exercises in giving shape to words were to lives trying to take shape themselves.  Along with all the knowledge about the various kinds of story-structure and the effects they can create, and about how to handle a moving point of view, or a section of dialect, Monty is able to give you a sense  that it’s all worth it; that a good transition from one scene to the next is an action of physical grace, like throwing a good curve ball; that getting a sentence right comes closer than most things to fulfilling your moral nature; that seeing something clearly, as it really is, is a gift to the world it’s in your power to give.     

Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. (PhD Syracuse). Marrs was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1967. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1969  and promoted to Professor in the 1970s. His major work was the 3 volume edition of The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb (Cornell UP; 1975, 1976, 1978).

Harry J. Mooney, Jr.  (PhD Pittsburgh, 1962). Mooney began the decade teaching as an Instructor but was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1962, after completing his degree. He was promoted to Associate rank in 1968 and Professor in the 1970s. Mooney did almost all of his important scholarly work early in his career. In 1957, as a graduate student, he published The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter (U of Pittsburgh P, 1957). This was followed by three books: James Gould Cozzens: Novelist of Intellect (Pittsburgh, 1964); The Shapeless God:  Essays in Modern Literature, editor, with Thomas F. Staley (Pittsburgh, 1968); and Leo Tolstoy: The Epic Vision (U of Tulsa, 1969).   

James D. Simmonds (PhD LSU). Simmonds was hired as Assistant Professor in 1965 and promoted to Associate in 1967. He was the founding editor of Milton Studies, a journal sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The editorial board included English department colleagues Charles Crow, Marcia Landy, and Harry Mooney. The first volume, published in 1969, was devoted to the 300^th anniversary of Paradise Lost and occasioned a university sponsored series of lectures on Milton.  

In 1969, Simmonds prepared a report on “The Personnel Crisis in the English Department,” a report which was said to have helped to create additional tenure track faculty lines in the 1970s. He based the report on a comparison with other departments at the University of Pittsburgh (French, German, Hispanic and Speech) and with the English departments at Penn State and Indiana. He notes the recent increase in faculty lines, but he argues

If the progress we have made in these matters seems substantial, that is a sign of the length of the journey, not of our having reached port. If we are more satisfied with how far we have come than concerned with how far we have to go, we will deceive ourselves in the same way as the Pittsburgher who thinks he breathes clean air. The Pittsburgh of twenty years ago is no place from which to draw one’s standard of air quality; the English department of two years ago is no place from which to draw one’s standard of an adequately staffed academic program. 

Assistant Professors

Donald Tritschler left the department in 1962 to take a position at Skidmore College where, in 1967, he was listed as an Associate Professor of English.

Daniel Marder left the department in 1962 for the University of Tulsa, where he served as Professor and department Chair. Marder published The Craft of Technical Writing (Macmillan, 1960), the edited volume, Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Twayne, 1967), Exiles at Home:  A Story of Literature in 19^th Century America (University Press of America, 1984) and The Arnold/Andre Transcripts: A Reconstruction (Library Research Associates, 1993).

Robert C. Laing, Jr. (PhD, Pittsburgh 1962) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1962. In 1964 he left to join the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford, where he taught until 1981. Laing was active in local theater. The University of Pittsburgh at Bradford offers a Robert C. Laing, Jr., Creative Arts Award.

Arthur H. Saxon (PhD Yale) completed his BA at the University of Pittsburgh in 1956. He received his MA from Columbia in English and Comparative Literature and his PhD in the History of the Theatre and Dramatic Criticism from Yale. Saxon returned to the University of Pittsburgh in 1966, where he taught for two years in Speech and Theater and one year, 1968/1969, as an Assistant Professor in the English department. Saxon has published widely on theater, circus, and popular entertainment. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1971. He is author of Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France (Yale UP, 1968); The Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow & The Romantic Age of the English Circus (Archon 1978); and the award-winning P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (Columbia UP, 1989). He is also the editor of Barnum’s letters. Saxon’s yet unpublished memoir contains recollections of Charles Crow. You can read an excerpt.

W. Austin Flanders (PhD Wisconsin) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1964 and promoted to Associate in 1969. He taught graduate seminars on 18^th century British literature and a wide range of undergraduate literature courses. Flanders was involved in the attempts to establish a Comparative Literature Program at the University. His essay on Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (Centennial Review, 1972) was reprinted in Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1975). He was the author of Structures of Experience: History, Society, and Personal Life in the 18^th Century British Novel (U of South Carolina P, 1984). Flanders served on the editorial board of Eighteenth Century Life.

Robert Marshall (PhD Wisconsin) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1964 and promoted to Associate rank in 1969. Trained as a medievalist, Marshall taught graduate courses in Anglo-Saxon language and literature, Chaucer, the 14^th century, and medieval drama. He taught a range of undergraduate courses including freshman composition, freshman honors, and the literature of sport. Marshall was involved with the Pittsburgh community through Project Upward Bound (1966-69), a program of support for low-income, under-achieving high school students. He was Co-director of Project Exchange (1968-69) which arranged two-week faculty exchanges between the University of Pittsburgh and two historically black colleges, Alabama State College and Jackson State College. In the 1970s, Marshall initiated and directed the English component of a federally sponsored program, TTT (Training the Trainers of Teachers), designed to bring faculty from the disciplines into productive contact with teachers and subject area programs in Schools of Education. From 1969-1971 he was the department’s “Coordinator of Innovation,” head of a committee directed to rethink the undergraduate curriculum and the training of Teaching Assistants. Marshall was active in the AAUP, serving as President for several years in the mid-70s.

Philip K. Wion (PhD Yale) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1967 and promoted to Associate in 1973. Wion (rhymes with “lion,” he told his students) worked in the areas of Renaissance literature and of literature and psychoanalysis. His essay on “The Absent Mother in Wuthering Heights,” American Imago (1985), was reprinted in the casebook, Wuthering Heights, edited by Linda Peterson (Bedford/St. Martins, 2003). Wion was very active in faculty governance, initially at the departmental level, where he was at the center of the group that wrote the English Department’s By-Laws, and later with the University Senate and the American Association of University Professors. He served multiple terms on Faculty Assembly and Senate Council, and on the Senate Budget Policies Committee (several as chair). He co-chaired the committee that devised the University’s Planning and Budgeting System, and served multiple terms on the University Planning and Budgeting Committee. He was president of the United Faculty (dually affiliated with the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers) during the ‘80s and early ‘90s, at the height of the (unsuccessful) effort to win collective bargaining rights for Pitt faculty, and continued as an officer of the Pitt AAUP chapter beyond his retirement from the University in 2009.  

James F. Knapp (PhD Connecticut), still an active member of the faculty, was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1966. He is currently (2014) Professor of English and Senior Associate Dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Knapp is the author of Ezra Pound (Twayne, 1979), the Norton Poetry Workshop, a multi-media CD-ROM published in conjunction with the Norton Anthology of Poetry, (W.W. Norton & Co, 1996), and Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work (Northwestern UP, 1998). He has published widely in academic journals with essays on such topics as primitivism in modern art, nationalism, modern poetry, and the culture of modernity. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on literary and cultural history, including Anglo-Irish literature, and Modernism in literature and the visual arts. Knapp has integrated multi-media computer technology into his teaching for many years. In 2005, he turned his attention to the Web as editor of the Norton Poetry Workshop Online. He is a past chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Information Technology.

Marcia Landy (PhD Rochester), who will retire in January 2015, was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1967. Landy was recruited as a Renaissance scholar to teach and write on the poetry of John Milton, but she quickly became a key figure in the reconfiguration of English studies both on our campus and nationally, efforts that led the nation. Early in her time in the department, she began to work on European literature. In the early 1970s, she taught the first courses on women at the University of Pittsburgh and was the primary author of the proposal to establish the Women’s Studies program (1971). In the 1970s, Landy served on the organizing committee of the Comparative Literature Program and later as its co-chair, with Edward Dudley of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. Courses in film were listed in the curriculum of Comp Lit—initially one developed by Landy and Daniel Russell, from French and Italian, another by Landy and Mariolina Salvatori, from English. With Bill Judson, Carnegie Museum Director of Film, and Bruce Goldstein, Psychology, Landy was appointed to a committee charged to develop an undergraduate Film Studies Program. Once approved, the new interdisciplinary Film Studies program was housed in the English Department and, in 1979, Lucy Fischer was hired to serve as Director. Since the late 1970s, the Film Studies Program has become an important part of the undergraduate and graduate mission of the College, and its students, faculty, and research have achieved international renown.

Cynthia (Matlack) Sutherland (PhD Penn) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1968. She worked on the use of computers in humanities research and, with her first husband, William Matlack, published ”A Statistical Approach to Problems of Attribution: A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” (College English, 1968). She also published essays on 18^th century British literature and was a founding editor of Eighteenth Century Life. During her nearly 30 years at Pitt, Sutherland taught literature and writing courses ranging from 18th-century literature to Shakespeare, children's literature, women and literature, and myth and folktale. She was active in the development of Women’s Studies on our campus and taught courses in the program’s early years.

Rae Lee Siporin (PhD UCLA) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1968. While at Pitt, and while serving as Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Siporin was part of the group that drafted the original proposal for our program in Women’s Studies (now “Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies”).  Siporin edited the 1972 Proceedings of the Conference, “Women and Education:  A Feminist Perspective,” a collection of papers on the “state and future of women’s studies and the position of women in the academy” sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh and the MLA Commission on the Status of Women. Siporin left Pittsburgh in the mid-70s to serve as Dean at Stockton State College in New Jersey. She went from there to Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire and from Franklin Pierce, in 1979, to UCLA where she served for 22 years as the Director of Admissions. At UCLA, Siporin co-founded the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Faculty/Staff Network. UCLA is home to the Rae Lee Siporin LGBT Library.

Ronald Curran (PhD Penn) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1969 and promoted to Associate Professor in 1974. He published essays on Hawthorne, Poe, and Hemingway, and a book, Witches, Wraiths and Warlocks: Supernatural Tales of the American Renaissance (Fawcett, 1971). Curran taught courses in literature and psychoanalysis; he also maintained a practice as a Jungian therapist. 

Virginia Elliott joined the department in 1967 as a Lecturer through a joint appointment with the School of Education, where she had been a member of the faculty since 1965. As Edwin Peterson moved toward retirement, Elliott was brought in to direct the Composition Program, to train the graduate assistants, and to coordinate the pool of non-tenure track instructors. With Lois Josephs, a PhD student in the department, she prepared and edited an NCTE report on English for the Academically Talented Student in the Secondary School (1969). She held the position of Director of Composition until 1974, when William E. Coles, Jr., was recruited for that position. Elliott also taught courses in children’s literature and women’s studies.