A History of the English Department at University Park

The story of Penn State’s English Department at University Park is as old as Penn State itself, for it has been a leading and central unit since the days of Fred Lewis Pattee. The “Department As We Know It” was really formed around 1959, when Henry Sams was recruited to unite two departments (English Composition, and English Literature)–to create one department in keeping with the research university that Penn State was then becoming. The identity of the department today—a unique amalgam of writers, rhetoricians, and literary and cultural scholars—derives fundamentally from that merger. No matter their research or creative interests, the English department has always been charged with providing highly regarded general education to the entire student body as well as specialized advanced studies for majors and graduate students to prepare those students for citizenship and a variety of vocations and professions. 

Before 1959

Fred Lewis Pattee is of course the figure most associated with English studies at Penn State in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Born in 1863 (he died in 1950), Pattee taught at Pennsylvania State College from 1895 until his retirement in 1928. “Professor of the English Language and Literature” within the Department of Composition and Rhetoric and (after 1918) “Professor of American Literature,” Pattee wrote poetry and fiction and memoirs, among many other works; in 1905, for example, he published The House of the Black Ring: A Romance of the Seven Mountains (recently reissued by Penn State Press with an introduction by the department’s Julia Kasdorf:  https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-05420-9.html). But Pattee is best remembered for famously endorsing the teaching of American literature in A History of American Literature (1896). Pattee also wrote the words to the College Alma Mater and was honored on the occasion of his death in 1950 when the freshly built university library was named for him. (Previously a small library had been housed in Old Main, until Carnegie Library, now Carnegie Building, was constructed in 1904.)

Before Pattee arrived, the very small Pennsylvania State College had usually included just one faculty member identified with “English.” But when College enrollment began increasing (to 1800 students in 1913), under President Edwin Erle Sparks, so did its English faculty: Pennsylvania State College faculty across disciplines altogether numbered just 117 in 1908 but grew to 214 in 1915; by 1924, the Department of English and Rhetoric alone, led by Pattee, counted thirty members, including three women and six people with doctorates. Included among those faculty were college registrar A. Howry Espenshade, Pattee’s brother George, and future speech communication department founder John H. Frizzell.

A second department, of English Literature, was created in 1933, and the two departments of English coexisted for the next twenty-five years. The faculty in Composition (or Composition and Journalism, as it was briefly called), now with Espenshade as head, taught the composition course required of all undergraduates; but his faculty also developed an array of course offerings in argument, grammar, technical writing, style, and creative writing–courses that could be used toward a degree. (Three graduate courses were also on the books.) Thus the Department of English Composition in 1935 counted 24 members, including Bob Galbraith, Edward Nichols, and the department’s only woman, Julia Gregg Brill (who had arrived in 1924 and then stayed after earning her M.A. from the department in 1927; for more on her career and her commitment to women students, see this entry in the Centre County Historical Society’s Encyclopedia: https://centrehistory.org/article/julia-brill/). The great poet Theodore Roethke started teaching in the Department of English Composition in the fall of 1936: in his late twenties, armed with his new MA, he offered courses in composition and poetry writing, composed and published his first book of poems as a member of the department (Open House; Knopf, 1941)–and coached the tennis team for five seasons—until leaving after 1943. By 1940 the Department of English Composition had grown to 38 members, including Brill, Nichols, Roethke, and recent arrivals Joseph Rubin and Kenneth Houp.

Meantime, literature offerings had developed even before the new Department of English Literature was formed. When in 1933 English Literature was spun off under the headship of William S. Dye, its nine faculty developed numerous lower-division general education courses as well as upper-level courses in the various periods (from Old English through American literature and comparative literature) that even now are visible in departmental curricula. Students could apply those courses toward a major, and there was also a full list of graduate courses in place, again based on periodization. In 1940 Bruce Sutherland, fresh from completing his M.A. at Penn, was one of a dozen members of the Department of English Literature.

After Pattee retired at age 65 (as was then the requirement), the fortunes of English continued to develop under Ralph Dorn Hetzel, President of Pennsylvania State College from 1927 until 1947. In addition to the new library building, the College during his tenure reconstructed Old Main in 1930, added The Nittany Lion Inn (in 1931), and built eleven other buildings during the 1930s—including Sparks and Burrowes as home to the School of Liberal Arts. (The School of Liberal Arts under long-term dean Charles Stoddart before World War II hosted the departments of Classical Languages, Economics and Sociology, English Composition, English Literature, German, History and Political Science, Math, Music, Philosophy, and Romance Languages; in the late 1930s Journalism was added out of English Composition, History and Political Science were separated, and Speech became its own department, with five faculty, under John Frizzell.) Pennsylvania State College enrolled 5000 students by 1936, but it also began offering some courses at remote locations (e.g., Pottsville, Hazelton, Dubois, Altoona) to accommodate the economic constraints placed on students by the Great Depression; and other locations were later added to manage the enrollment pressures of the post-World War II period. The Graduate School was created in 1922, but enrollments for the M.A. and PhD in English were quite modest. In those pre-war days the overwhelming majority of students were white male undergraduate Pennsylvanians: women were vastly outnumbered, mostly segregated into their own separate and second-class sphere, while gradually becoming more numerous and prominent; and students of color at the College were few and far between.

The immediate post-war years were characterized by the same challenges that were confronting other universities. The G. I. Bill encouraged a crush of new students to enroll, and by 1947-48 over 11,000 students, over half of them veterans, had crowded onto campus. A housing shortage was severe: women’s dorms were hastily built, and old military barracks temporarily sprouted on the edge of campus. The students in those barracks were often married, matured by war experiences, highly motivated and goal-oriented, impatient with trivia, and often confrontational and questioning of platitudes. The faculty loved teaching them. In 1949 Ben Euwema, whose doctorate was in English, had left Michigan State to take over as dean of the School of Liberal Arts (until 1964, when he briefly returned to teaching before retiring): Economics was now in Liberal Arts; Brice Harris had arrived as head of the fifteen-member Department of English Literature; and  Lynn Christy had joined the twenty-three person Composition Department. Two additional women were now on the faculty, Anna Locklin in English Literature and Agnes McElwee in English Composition. (Dr. McElwee had finished her PhD at Penn State in 1942 and would remain, progressing through the ranks, until her retirement in the early 1970s.)

During the 1950s, presidents Milton Eisenhower (1950-1956) and Eric Walker (1956-1970), in keeping with national trends, oversaw a further sharp expansion in student enrollment and determined that the university needed to more fully embrace its research mission. Enrollment grew from roughly 12,000 in 1950 to 16,500 in 1964-65, with women now comprising about a quarter to a third of the student body; a few students of color were now in evidence; and the name of Pennsylvania State College was changed to Pennsylvania State University in 1953. Accordingly, the various “Schools” became “Colleges”: the largest, the College of the Liberal Arts (including now the School of Fine Arts, made up of Art, Music, and Theatre, soon to become the College of Arts and Architecture); the College of Engineering (also large); and the Colleges of Education, Agriculture, Home Economics, Physical Education, Chemistry and Physics (later Science), and Mineral Industries. The College of Business opened in 1950.

“English” in the 1950s continued to operate as two departments. English Composition still took care of the lower-division required courses, but now its upper-division courses for majors were more numerous and popular. Bob Galbraith, John Bowman, Edward Nichols, Joseph Grucci, and Bernard Oldsey were all in place by 1952. Joseph Heller, having earned his MA in 1949, taught in the Composition Department 1950-1952, and John Barth arrived in 1955, along with Leonard Rubinstein. Julia Brill retired as a full professor in 1954.

The English Literature department was also growing. Its 21 members in 1952 included Brice Harris (head), Ralph Condee, and Arthur Lewis. All three had completed their doctorates–Lewis had completed his at Penn State in 1951 (thanks in part to the G.I. Bill), and he became an authority on utopian literature, eventually serving as the department’s associate head and later as associate dean of the College of the Liberal Arts until his retirement in 1985. Those doctorates, by the way, were becoming essential credentials for new hires in Literature, while English Composition hosted several PhDs and M.A.s but now was expecting achievement as practicing writers as the key credential for its faculty. And while both English Composition and English Literature were welcoming more and more graduate students now, both were still attending mostly to their undergraduate missions. During the McCarthy years Penn State was fairly insulated from the most severe right-wing extremes of the era, but its English offerings and its New Critical pedagogies were already quite conservative.

Henry Sams and the English Department in the 1960s

President Milton Eisenhower in 1953 was overseeing the formal transformation of Pennsylvania State College into Pennsylvania State University (the town of State College resisted the name change), and his successor Eric Walker, president from 1956 until 1970, fully endorsed the research and graduate school mission implied by the “university” status. Accordingly, it was determined that the two English departments should be joined into one entity beginning in 1958-59. Under acting head Bruce Sutherland, the department reorganized itself into a single unit: during the two-year transition period, the department members decided to retain two distinct if overlapping major curricula, while the departments themselves were completely merged, with faculty members retaining their titles—Professor of Composition or Professor of English Literature. In this interim stalwarts Harrison T. Meserole, Richard Gidez, and Robert Frank were hired to teach literature, Jack McManus and Robert Weaver were recruited to teach writing courses, and novelist, poet, and literary scholar Maurice Cramer came from the University of Chicago to teach writing and literature classes. Change is always complicated, and the new department needed the outstanding leadership only a man such as Henry Sams could supply.

After the 1958-59 academic year, then, bringing JGE along with him, Sams came to Penn State as professor and head of English, and he set about to build an excellent department in keeping with the expansion of college enrollments and a new emphasis on graduate studies. He had inherited many talented faculty from the two prior departments—among them writers John Barth (who wrote his Sot-Weed Factor as a faculty member from 1953-1965); Edward Nichols (baseball and jazz enthusiast, fiction writer, and author of the first book published by Penn State Press, a biography of Civil War general Joshua Reynolds); novelist Leonard Rubinstein (who had arrived in 1952 after completing an Iowa MFA and who oversaw the writing option within the English major for many years); Rubinstein’s frequent collaborator Bob Weaver; and Kenneth Houp and William Damerst (who produced pioneering work in business and technical writing); among others.

From among the literature faculty Sams inherited medievalist Robert Frank, Miltonist Ralph Condee, Robert Browning scholar Cramer, and Harrison Meserole (who would remain editor of the MLA International Bibliography and stay until 1985); Deborah Austin (the first woman on the English faculty with a PhD, she had arrived in 1955); Stanley Weintraub (who had earned his PhD at Penn State in 1956 before joining the faculty as an expert on Shaw, and who would advance to Evan Pugh Professor); Joseph Rubin (a Whitman scholar who taught American literature from 1935 to 1978); Bruce Sutherland, a pioneer in the study of Australian and Commonwealth literature; and Arthur Lewis. Sams also inherited Bernard Oldsey, a fiction writer who also taught American literature for two decades (until 1969) after earning his BA, MA, and PhD from Penn State after the war.

And Sams recruited extremely well too during the 1960s and early 1970s. He brought in distinguished visiting faculty to be in residence for short periods, including Kenneth Burke and William Empson. And he hired established writers for the permanent faculty, among them Philip Klass (who published nonfiction as well as science fiction stories and novels under the name “William Tenn”); the poet John Haag (who published his The Brine-Breather collection in 1971 and taught from the early 1960s until the early 1990s); and Paul West (a celebrated and prolific writer who was elected to the American Association of Arts and Letters in 1985 and who produced over 50 books, most of them while teaching semi-annuallyat PSU from 1962-1995). In 1961 Charles T. Davis joined the department from Princeton: in 1963 he was tenured and promoted to Professor—Penn State’s first tenured Black faculty member. (If you are curious to learn more about him, consult online sources, including https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/davis-charles-t.) Talented graduate students were now coming out of the department, among them Paul Hendrickson and David Morrell. To buttress the literature wing of his department, during the 1960s and early 1970s Sams hired others who would become mainstays over the next decades—among them Joseph Price and John Moore (Shakespeare and Early Modern British literature), John Buck and Nick Joukovsky (Eighteenth Century British), Robert Lougy (Victorian literature), Michael Begnal (Irish and 20th century literature), Elmer Borklund (literary criticism), and Americanists Robert Hudspeth, Wilma Ebbitt, James Rambeau, and Robert Secor. The esteemed Americanist Philip Young (who had published the first significant scholarship on Ernest Hemingway in 1952) arrived in 1960, destined to became a department cornerstone and Evan Pugh Professor. Young later collaborated (on The Hemingway Manuscripts: An Inventory, published by Penn State Press in 1969) with Charles W. Mann , who established Penn State’s rare book room as a librarian. Advancing to Professor of English in 1975, Mann possessed an agile curiosity about everything, a genial personality, and an unceasing and unpretentious eagerness to assist faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates alike.

Sams’s formidable charisma and administrative acumen were up to the challenge of managing this large new department, then, and he was assisted by the concurrent arrival of very healthy enrollments, improving facilities and teaching assignments, and full classrooms that always make faculty happy. During Eric Walker’s tenure as president, over a hundred building projects were initiated at University Park—dorms, recreational facilities, classrooms, and research facilities such as the Applied Research Lab—to accommodate the more than 25,000 undergraduate students, products of the Baby Boom and the post-Sputnik emphasis on education, that were populating the campus by 1969-70. (Another 10,000 enrolled at Commonwealth Campuses.)  A great many of the new students were gravitating to the College of the Liberal Arts: while enrollments in Engineering advanced from 3200 to just 3800 during the decade, enrollment in Liberal Arts went from 2500 to over 7000. Graduate student enrollment also doubled during the decade, to 5200, and a similar spike was evident in Liberal Arts and in English. An English Honors Program was invented, a precursor to the Schreyer Honors College.

But it wasn’t just facilities and enrollments and attitudes that changed for the better. Reflecting these good times, well into the 1970s the faculty held frequent parties and social gatherings that built camaraderie and cooperation. Penn State created a twelve-month academic calendar—four “terms” of ten weeks, plus exam week, with all classes meeting for 75 minutes three times a week—to provide more student capacity. (The idea was that some students would finish their degrees in three years by taking classes year-round.) Academic colleges were reorganized, so that Liberal Arts spun off its School of Fine and Applied Arts into the College of Arts and Architecture, the Colleges of Home Economics and Health and Physical Education became The College of Human Development, and the College of Agriculture gave up botany and zoology to the newly named College of Science. (Mathematics also left Liberal Arts for Science.) If the state government in Harrisburg was often stingy with appropriations needed to support all the student growth, since economic reversals were beginning to erode the state’s tax base, there was still enough money to advance the university’s research mission and reputation: in 1958 Penn State Press began issuing volumes, and the university was admitted to the Association of American Universities (AAU); and in 1966 the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies (now the Humanities Institute) was founded. No wonder the number of faculty increased during the decade. Tenured and tenure-line English faculty at University Park numbered 78 in 1960 (eight were women), and that figure held through the late 1970s. Since other U. S. colleges and universities were also growing, since faculty prestige was on the rise, and since teaching opportunities for new PhDs were plentiful, the students who earned Penn State doctorates were typically well received on the academic job market. As a result, graduate enrollments and graduate degrees produced also increased substantially.

In 1972, after all those significant years as head of English, Sams was tapped to serve as associate dean of the Graduate School. He had already served as the first chair of the University Faculty Senate, a measure of the respect in which he was held, and his English faculty colleagues marked the occasion by creating a festschrift in his honor, Directions in Literary Criticism (Penn State Press, 1973). Then at the age of 65, in 1977, Sams along with his spouse Carole retired.

The 1970s and 1980s: A Crash, Its Consequences, and A Recovery

Seemingly overnight the happy days disappeared. Without much warning the entire decade of the 1970s took a turn for the worse, especially in English studies. The Watergate scandal in Washington that was mirrored by the scandals in Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp’s administration; the steep inflation and unemployment (around 10% in Pennsylvania throughout most of the decade) that hampered the nation and the Commonwealth; the terrible floods resulting from Hurricane Agnes in 1972 and Johnstown dam failure in 1977, causing cataclysmic and costly damage in Pennsylvania; the blizzards and record cold of the winter of 1977-1978; the cultural malaise in music, film, and other arts: it all impacted Pennsylvania and Penn State terribly. The Pennsylvania legislature, broken by the recession, could not pass a state budget in 1977, forcing Penn State to borrow heavily. Highways were left to deteriorate, and dead animals piled up on state roads and interstate highways. PSU President John Oswald arrived in 1970 to address the challenges, but he was plagued by ill health, precarious university finances, student unrest, and the threat of faculty unionization. True, there were positive developments in certain areas—non-white enrollment improved (it couldn’t get much worse) and many more women were enrolling (in the late 1970s 60% of the student body was still male but the majority of the freshman class in 1976 was female)—but it was generally a bleak decade.

Things were particularly bleak for English. Just as student unrest was peaking and courses attentive to African American and other minority traditions were being added to the curriculum, Charles Davis left the university for the University of Iowa (and later for Yale). In 1969-70, there were 520 declared English majors (juniors and seniors); but by 1977 there were just 236—this at a time when Penn State enrollments more generally continued to soar as a means of balancing the budget. (Across campuses PSU enrolled 35,764 students in 1969-70 and 49, 360 in 1973-74.) Enrollments in upper-division English courses accordingly plunged from 3836 in 1972-1973 to about 2300 in 1977-1978, leaving faculty to scramble for attractive teaching assignments as the number of upper-division sections dropped from 76 in 1972-1973 to half that in 1976-1977. Other universities were experiencing the same drop-offs, and so applications to the PSU English graduate program dwindled: the 559 applications in 1969-1970 became just 123 in 1977, a drop of nearly 80%; and sometimes not enough qualified graduate students could be found to fill available teaching assistantships. With Sams gone, replaced by a series of short-term and interim heads, something of a leadership gap left the department ill prepared to adapt to the crisis–the department even ran out of paper and other basic supplies in April 1979. Morale naturally dropped, and simmering rivalries intensified between literature-major faculty (now bleeding students and focused on a collapsing graduate program) and writing-major faculty (which could now claim most of the remaining undergraduate students but felt the loss of graduate students).

Indeed, things were so bad that the composition program (and its required courses and assistantships that had long bolstered the department) was almost removed from English. When Sams arrived in 1960, experienced tenure-track faculty teaching six courses a year were handling a large proportion of the required composition courses; but as enrollments surged, faculty were increasingly pulled to the upper division and composition courses were left to part-time teachers and teaching assistants, with little supervision or experience and a propensity for independence. As enrollments spiked on the Commonwealth Campuses (there were over 10,000 students there by 1970), the expanding faculty members in the Commonwealth Education System were teaching composition in a similarly well-meaning but laissez-faire fashion. Well before World War II, English departments nationwide had turned away from serious thinking about rhetoric and required composition courses (it was one reason behind the invention of Speech departments), and composition curricula had grown stale. At Penn State during the 1960s and 1970s the conduct of the required English 1 course (Exposition) remained fairly stable, but required English 3—roughly guided by the values evident in Leonard Rubinstein’s Writing: A Habit of Mind—became especially chaotic when it was turned over to the unsupervised and under-prepared teaching assistants. Dean Stanley Paulsen demanded that the situation be rectified, or else.

Amid these troubles there were some positive developments. The noted and personable poet Agha Shahid Ali received his PhD in 1984. Enrollments in technical writing were expanding from 1196 students in 1972-73 to 2885 in 1977-1978. When Governor Dick Thornburgh was elected in 1977, he oversaw an overdue increase in state appropriations as the national economy rebounded. John Balaban joined the English faculty as an instructor in 1970–by 1976 his work in poetry had made him an associate professor. Dan Walden took on the new American Studies program in 1970-1971, and in the mid-1970s the Comparative Literature program under Caroline Eckhardt was promoted to department status. Prolific scholars Kathryn Hume (medieval) and Robert Hume (British drama, 1650-1800) came from Cornell in 1977—during their many years on the faculty Robert would become an Evan Pugh Professor and Kathryn a Sparks Professor. Professional developments in historicism and critical theory were animating pedagogical and scholarly practices. And the situation in composition and rhetoric was addressed in the short run when Professor Wilma Ebbitt (another Sams hire with University of Chicago ties) took over temporarily from the department’s first Director of Composition, James Holahan, as Director of Composition in 1975. English 3 was converted to the honors course English 30, and a vigorous conversation ensued about the place of “literature” in new required English 20. To ameliorate the situation in Composition over the longer term, three faculty were hired for 1978-1979, including Marie Secor; Jack Selzer in the same year was hired to help address increasing enrollments in technical writing. These untenured faculty regularized and professionalized the composition offerings around process and argument pedagogies, created new administrative practices that are necessary in any massive, multi-section, multi-campus program (e.g., class sizes were capped at 24 and a Composition Committee was established), created a Writing Center and Basic Writing for underprepared students, and introduced a new faculty clientele to the department—specialists in the nascent English field of rhetoric and composition.

When Wendell Harris came in as head in 1979, he further restored departmental equilibrium, including the conversion to the “early semester” fifteen-week academic calendar. The abandonment of the “term system” and its four ten-week “semesters,” in favor of the two-fifteen-week-semesters plan, had the effect of reducing teaching loads to four courses per year for regular faculty and thereby improving the conditions for research and creative production. Some hard feelings and reduced opportunities for faculty persisted through the 1980s, but the department members during the decade gradually made room for its growing rhetoric faculty, got in step with its graduate student responsibilities, and accommodated raised expectations for faculty publication and creative output. Harris and his successor as head Christopher Clausen professionalized and democratized the department’s hiring, administrative, and governance practices. Accomplished women (e.g., Deborah Clarke, Laura Knoppers, Charlotte Holmes, Carla Mulford) found their way onto the tenure-track ranks. John Harwood was hired as the first continuing Director of Composition, and the launch of the summertime Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition in 1981 brought national recognition to that area of the department; by the mid-1980s it was possible for graduate students to choose rhetoric and composition as a specialty. Finally, the graduate program in “writing” was converted to an MFA in “creative writing” when Robert Downs was recruited to take over program direction.

With stable funding now in place, things settled down across the university. Probably best of all, new President Bryce Jordan had restored faculty morale and institutional aspirations: when Jordan arrived in 1983, he declared that the university should advance to the top tier of public universities, and he retired—mission accomplished!—after announcing that the university had been invited to join the Big Ten and its prestigious Committee on Institutional Cooperation. When Jordan arrived in 1983 the university’s endowment was about $25 million; by the time he retired in 1990 the university’s alumni and friends had grown it to nearly $400 million, most of the proceeds designated for endowed faculty positions, privately funded buildings, and student scholarships. The stage was set for another departmental advance.

The 1980s through 2005: Renewal, Revival, Distinction

When Robert Secor took over as department head in 1990, conditions were indeed ripe for advancement. One of those conditions was an improvement in the undergraduate population, reflected in the creation of the University Scholars Program, that coincided with admission to the Big Ten: now many more well qualified in-state and out-of-state students were being attracted to Penn State, and the size of the freshman and sophomore classes was growing steadily. Another was the 1991 arrival of Susan Welch as dean of the College of the Liberal Arts: over her many years as dean she would improve the College’s academic reputation and standing, emphasize graduate education and interdisciplinarity, and raise the endowments necessary for her lofty ambitions to be realized. When Welch brought with her a commitment to “strategic planning” as a means of directing policy and resources, after the example of President Jordan, Secor was ready and resolute. He had already initiated a strategic planning effort of his own during his first year as head, so he was ready to share a late draft of it with Dean Welch soon after she arrived. Welch immediately signed off on many of its signal proposals, and Secor quickly moved to realize its goals. In return for emphasizing doctoral education over masters’, in keeping with Dean Welch’s vision, he accepted twenty new teaching assistantships from the administration so that a dozen or so talented new PhDs would be graduating each year with a like number of MFAs. He encouraged collaboration and interdisciplinarity—cooperation with other departments and programs (like Women’s Studies, Science Technology and Society, and History) as well as within the department, so that “boundaries” between literature, rhetoric, and theory grew more permeable over time. He addressed the long overdue hiring of senior women and minority faculty by assisting the promotion of long-time associate professor Audrey Rodgers and by hiring senior African Americanist Bernard Bell, Twain scholar Susan Harris, and feminists Linda Woodbridge (Shakespeare) and Susan Squier (a science studies scholar, and the new Brill Professor). (Robert Edwards, a medievalist, and Americanist James L. W. West had arrived in the late 1980s, replacing retired professors Frank, Meserole, and Young.) More broadly, Secor sponsored the recruitment of accomplished junior faculty, including Jeffrey Nealon (in theory and cultural studies) and Robin Schulze (American poetry), as well as scholars working in African American literature, such as Iyun Osagie, William Harris, and Linda Selzer. And he secured the new graduate emphasis in rhetoric and composition by recruiting senior professor Don Bialostosky, who himself would then succeed Secor as head in 1995 and build on Secor’s accomplishments, notably by hiring African American writer and rhetorician Keith Gilyard, poets Julia Kasdorf and Cecil Giscombe, feminist rhetorician Cheryl Glenn and science studies rhetorician Richard Doyle, cultural studies standout Michael Bérubé, and modernists Janet Lyon and Mark Morrisson.

By the end of the century, therefore, the department could boast that its faculty members were publishing widely and well, winning prestigious awards for scholarship and teaching, achieving national and international recognitions, editing top journals, and leading many professional associations associated with English studies. To cite only some examples, the first conference of the Modernist Studies Association was held at Penn State in 1999 (thanks to leadership from Sanford Schwartz and Mark Morrisson); and Keith Gilyard and Cheryl Glenn each served (in 1999 and 2007) as chairs of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The NEH-funded Hemingway Letters Project, under the direction of Sandra Spanier, was launched in 2002; it would go on to create multiple volumes of the letters for Cambridge University Press. At the same time the number of named and otherwise endowed professorships held by English faculty had multiplied. The department was producing honors undergraduates at a high rate and regularly placing its PhD and MFA graduates in enviable positions—notably (but not only) in the field of rhetoric and composition. When Keith Gilyard joined what was now a substantial cohort of minority faculty, Penn State English was becoming a leading producer of African American PhDs in English.

Indeed, by 2005 the department was boasting something of an all-star team of writers and scholars in all fields, so that when the National Research Council in 2010-2011 announced its ranking of well over a hundred graduate programs in English, based on faculty publication and awards, student GRE scores, diversity, and employment outcomes, the department placed among the top ten English departments in the nation.

Since 2005

It is probably not wise to attempt a history of the English department in the current, not-so-new century. After all, it’s been a period full of substantial stresses with consequences that are still unfolding—the loss of assistantships devoted to the MFA program after the financial struggles associated with 9/11 and the Pennsylvania legislature’s continuing penury; the financial crisis of 2009 that stretched university resources; the Sandusky Scandal; the upheavals caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, beginning in 2020. And why multiply the oversights and inadequacies that anyone can already see in a history colored by the perspectives of its author? Please forgive its author for everything that has been missed in this summary–for the tidy but certainly oversimplified periodization guiding this history as well as the many worthy individuals and topics that have been elided in this account. With only a few exceptions the author has pretty much left out the names of everyone who remains active on the University Park faculty, figuring that those people are still creating the department’s history (it was especially tempting, for example, to mention that Hester Blum, who arrived in 2009, led the creation of C-19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, which held its first conference at University Park in 2010; and that Michael Bérubé was elected president of the Modern Language Association in 2012); also omitted have been the names of a great many people and their significant contributions before and after 1960. So many topics have indeed been left out–a detailed history of the graduate programs; a sidebar recognizing various departmental award winners; a chronicle of the honors program; an account of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies; the innovations of other consequential department heads; attention to all the various journals that faculty have overseen; a record of the English faculty at other PSU locations.

How will the English department respond to the professional, institutional, and cultural challenges that confront it at a time of uncertainty and change in American higher education? Whatever the answers to that question, expect the department’s reputation for quality, accomplishment, and commitment to continue.