A short-term teaching gig that turned very enticing might have led Carol Gilligan to leave Harvard University for a professorship at New York University. Instead, for the next two years at least, Ms. Gilligan will maintain ties with both institutions, keeping tenure at Harvard while teaching part time there and at N.Y.U.
“Right now, it’s an ideal situation for me,” says Ms. Gilligan, a professor of gender studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She wants to be in Cambridge to oversee the introduction of a new gender-studies program, which will begin to offer master’s degrees in the fall of 2001. Yet she says her intellectual interests are in synch with professors at N.Y.U.'s law school, where she teaches seminars that combine psychology, philosophy, law, and theater.
David Richards, an N.Y.U. law professor with whom she has been teaching, is convinced that Ms. Gilligan is coming permanently. The Harvard professor is making no commitments. She says she turned down a university professorship at N.Y.U., but doesn’t seem to be closing any doors. “I’m holding my tenure at Harvard for the moment,” she says. “Everybody’s happy about this. I’m happy. Harvard’s happy. N.Y.U.'s happy. It’s an arrangement that benefits everybody.”
Ms. Gilligan first came to N.Y.U. at the invitation of Jerome Bruner, a psychologist with a joint appointment in the law school there. She co-taught with him and Mr. Richards in 1998-99. She spent this academic year back at Harvard. But she’s itching to rejoin her colleagues at N.Y.U.'s law school, an unlikely home for the scholar best known for her 1982 study of adolescent girlhood, In a Different Voice. That work continues to stir up controversy, most recently in a critical cover story in The Atlantic Monthly.
Over the years, N.Y.U.'s law school has made room for professors with dual appointments, including Ronald Dworkin, who also teaches at the University of Oxford.
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Among those with whom Ms. Gilligan expects to work at N.Y.U.: the actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, who is moving from Stanford University.
Beginning this fall, she’ll have a joint appointment at N.Y.U. in the law school and in the Tisch School of the Arts, where she’ll teach performance studies and work in a new department of art and public policy.
Mary Schmidt Campbell, the Tisch School’s dean, first met Ms. Smith when she came to interview the dean for Fires in the Mirror, a play about racial tension in New York City. In that and later works, Ms. Smith embodies various real-life characters who observed or lived through incendiary events. “I’m one of the people who was left on the cutting-room floor,” says Ms. Campbell. Still, she was impressed by Ms. Smith’s method, and by the ties between artists and scholars that she had forged through the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, a program she has run at Harvard for the last two summers. The third version begins this month.
“This was a very exciting conjunction of theory and practice,” Ms. Campbell says. “I thought, ‘Boy, wouldn’t it be great if we had her here?’” She says that John Sexton, the dean of N.Y.U.'s law school, thought the same thing, leading to the unusual hire.
At the law school, Ms. Smith “will focus on how the voices of different parties and constituencies are heard, or lost, in the work that lawyers and judges do,” says Richard Pierce, a spokesman for the university.
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“The modern vice of unrest” was Thomas Hardy’s phrase. Franco Moretti puts it even more simply: “I like to move.” So, after 10 years as a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, he is joining the Stanford faculty this fall.
In part the move will allow him to place novelists, like Hardy, at the forefront of scholarly inquiry. At Stanford, Mr. Moretti will be a professor of English and head a new Center for the Study of the Novel. Described as the first of its kind, the center will hold conferences and organize discussion groups around recent scholarly studies of the novel, with the authors of those studies present.
A generation ago, the novel was considered a less significant literary form than poetry and drama, Mr. Moretti argues. Today that’s turned around, and the new Stanford center can play “a leading role in the renewal of literary research,” he says. Established figures like Hardy are only one target; the center will encourage international studies and support graduate students who do research on the scores of novels that have never been canonized. And it will reflect Mr. Moretti’s interest in applying social-science methods, including quantitative analysis, to determine what kinds of people read novels in different historical periods.
“We’re hoping this will ignite a cross-field collaboration that will make our strengths more apparent,” says John Bender, a professor of English and comparative literature.
Mr. Moretti is the second senior scholar Stanford has been able to recruit since committing three years ago to rejuvenate the English department. Arnold Rampersad came from Princeton University in 1998.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A14