English Professor Receives Tenure

Playing competitive tennis, studying engineering and working in finance were all part of the circuitous route that John Stauffer took to become a tenured professor in the English department.

Stauffer, the Loeb associate professor of the humanities, yesterday became just the third junior faculty member to win tenure in the English department in the last 14 years.

Stauffer, who is on leave this year, studies American literature and culture, particularly 19th century, and teaches classes on Civil War and protest literature. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race, won a Yale prize in 2002 for being the best book on slavery, resistance and abolitionism published that year.

“He knows a lot about cultural history and beyond history, also about photography and film studies. He’s a person of very wide knowledge,” said English department chair Lawrence Buell, who pointed to Stauffer’s tenure as evidence that the department is promoting more professors from within than it has been able to historically.

Stauffer’s route to tenure was anything but ordinary, however.

Before he became an assistant professor at Harvard in 1999, Stauffer had earned a undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Duke, where he was ranked 40th in the country in collegiate tennis.

He then worked in the finance sector for several years before discovering that he “hated” the job and deciding to enroll in a doctoral program at Yale, where he earned a Ph.D. in American studies.

“The two things I loved to do in my life were tennis, and scholarship and writing. I got sidetracked for a bit,” he said.

Stauffer said that while he always loved literature, his parents were unsure about his prospects as an academic.

“My parents thought that the idea of writing for a living or being a professor was crazy...I basically had a hard time standing up for myself,” said Stauffer, who spent the years between fifth and tenth grades moving among small towns in Nebraska, Iowa and North Dakota.

Stauffer said he’s happy that he took a roundabout route to Harvard’s English department.

“I don’t regret the engineering degree,” he said. “I see math as a language. The more languages one acquires, the more competent one is in the world.”

Buell compares Stauffer’s repertoire of interests to those of a Harvard student.

“I think that what we’ve got here is a kind of latter-day Renaissance man,” he said. “But I don’t mean to suggest that it’s completely unique. If you look at the Harvard undergraduate student body, there are many people who are astonishingly good at several things, and I think he’s that kind of person too.”

For Stauffer, the tenure process began last spring, when the English department began to discuss The Black Hearts of Men and Stauffer’s other works.

The department then recommended Stauffer for tenure in February, and after the ad hoc committee reviewing his work met with University President Lawrence H. Summers in March, Summers approved the offer.

Stauffer, who also considered a job offer from Amherst, said that while he was drawn to the school’s small community and large degree of professor-student interaction, Harvard’s English department is more interdisciplinary, allowing him to combine interests in literature and history.

“Harvard’s English department is a very diverse place, which I very much like,” Stauffer said. “Everyone is grounded and trained in English and literary studies, but there is also some great historical work being done.”

Stauffer is currently working on a book called By the Love of Comrades: Interracial Friendships, Democratic Dreams and the Meaning of America, which uses the Aristotelian idea of friendship as a “test case for a virtuous society,” he said.

“All three groups, in black, in Native American and in white traditions, define equality as one of the many meanings of friendship,” Stauffer said.

He said he found that true equality among interracial friends depends on the sharing of political ideals.

“When blacks and whites have the same political commitment, their friendships and their interactions are at equality,” Stauffer said.

In researching the book, Stauffer examined the course of American history, finding that “the Civil War-era and World War II are two moments in which interracial friendships and visions of interracial equality begin to proliferate,” he said.

He studied America’s literature as well, finding that “a lot of the classic literature on interracial friendship, Melville, Cooper, Twain, all of them, in creating their classic stories, were self-conscious of using friendship as a way to explore American political ideals.”

In both American history and literature, interracial friendships seem to “occur in some sort of a frontier space, whether in the wilderness, a whaling ship or a river raft in the nineteenth century”—an area outside of mainstream society that allows people to “live subversively,” Stauffer said.

Stauffer has taught English 176a, “American Protest Literature,” which Buell described as one of the most popular courses in the department, English 172, “19th-Century American Novel,” and English 90kw, “The American Civil War.”

He plans next year to teach courses on Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, and on ethnic American autobiography.

Students praised Stauffer for his wide expertise on American history and literature.

“What is incredibly impressive about him is that he has this endless reserve of knowledge,” said Margot E. Kaminski ’04, who took Stauffer’s seminar on American historical fiction and a sophomore History and Literature tutorial he co-taught. “He’s been able to recommend a minimum of 10 books for whatever topic I come to him about.”

Kaminski said she is still grateful that Stauffer let her into his seminar, which had mostly graduate students, when she was a first-year.

Buell describes Stauffer, who supervises student work in English, History and Literature and a graduate program on American Civilizations, as “one of the best mentors of individual student projects.”

He also cited Stauffer’s “skill and commitment in working with undergraduate honors projects, trying to enable the students that he’s working with to do the very best that they can do.”

—Staff writer Tina Wang can be reached at tinawang@fas.harvard.edu.