Susanne Wofford Joins NYU to Lead School
Each fall at NYU brings a set of beginnings, as first-year and transfer students navigate their surroundings, upperclassmen set forth on new academic paths, and faculty prepare to advise a group of fresh, eager faces. For the Gallatin community, this fall marks another kind of beginning: a new and exciting deanship at the School.
On July 1, 2007, Susanne Wofford officially took the reins as Gallatin's dean, following her appointment to this role in early April. A distinguished scholar of epic poetry and Renaissance and early modern literature who most recently served as director of the Center for the Humanities and Mark Eccles Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), Wofford emerged from a nationwide, 18-month search.
Diane Yu, NYU Chief of Staff and Deputy to the President, stated, "We are delighted to have Susanne Wofford as Gallatin's dean. She has a record of exceptional scholarship in early modern literature and is a recognized advocate of interdisciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences. Her highly successful leadership of the Center for the Humanities at Wisconsin was instrumental in expanding its scope, increasing its visibility, engaging the faculty, and building the Center’s capacity to influence the greater academic community. She has developed an excellent reputation for consensus building, teamwork, public articulation, and creativity. Moreover, she won teaching awards at both Yale and Wisconsin, and I believe that Gallatin students will find her to be both dynamic and caring."
Dean Wofford earned her undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Yale College, and received her B.Phil. in general and comparative literature from Oxford University and both her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University. She went on to teach at Yale for 10 years, then in 1992 joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. She has been a member of the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English since 1987, was a visiting professor of English at Harvard in 1999, and was a visiting faculty member in Princeton's Program in Theatre and Drama and a fellow of Princeton's Council of the Humanities in 2000. At the University of Wisconsin, she was chair of the Divisional Committee for Arts and Humanities and director of graduate studies in English before assuming her role in the Center for the Humanities.
"Coming from directing a Center for the Humanities, necessarily a small unit in a large state university, it is delightful to encounter an entire school devoted to just the kinds of interdisciplinary learning and public outreach to which I have been devoting my efforts on a much smaller scale," Wofford states. "Gallatin also embodies in an unusually intense form NYU’s special relation to New York City," she continues. "I find the School’s combination of interdisciplinary academic learning with the encouragement of both internships and other kinds of work in city neighborhoods and communities to be an inspiring example of the value of public intellectual life."
Wofford enthusiastically embraced her move from the Midwest to New York and is enjoying settling in to her new environment. In addition to her administrative duties, the dean plans to teach a Gallatin seminar in the spring semester and—with research interests including Shakespeare, Spenser, and comparative European drama—she is also particularly drawn to the notion of the artist-scholar that is at the root of Gallatin's Arts Program.
"The School offers an extraordinary combination of a strong community that treasures the individual and the unique ways that each scholar and artist defines him or herself," she notes. "I am excited by the passionate nature of the faculty’s commitment to discussing intellectual questions and by Gallatin's creative combination of traditional academic study with the arts. We are more and more a society of performance and performances, and connecting serious work in the arts to serious academic study seems an enormously worthwhile and important thing to teach students to do."
Dean Wofford will also hold an associated appointment with the Department of English in NYU’s Faculty of Arts and Science. Jane Tylus, NYU’s Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, noted, "Susanne brings to NYU remarkable talents as a teacher as well as enviable administrative skills, thanks to her experience at Wisconsin and as past president of the Shakespeare Association of America. Her broad-ranging interests in the liberal arts and her work with high school teachers and local communities made her a natural choice for Gallatin's next leader."
Dean Wofford’s publications include The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford University Press, 1992); Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Politics of Community (coeditor) (University of California Press, 1999); Shakespeare: The Late Tragedies (Prentice-Hall, 1995); and Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (St. Martin’s Press, 1994). She is the recipient of many prizes and honors, including the University of Wisconsin Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; the University of Wisconsin Romnes Fellowship; the Hilldale Award for Collaborative Research, UW-Madison; the Robert Frost Chair at the Bread Loaf School of English; the Isabel MacCaffrey Prize (awarded by the Spenser Society); the William Cline Devane Medal for Distinguished Teaching at Yale University; the Sarai Ribicoff Award for the Encouragement of Teaching in Yale College; and the Yale College-Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities.
Wofford is being welcomed to campus in a series of events and activities, including a reception hosted by NYU President John Sexton. She first met with Gallatin's incoming class of students at Convocation, an academic rite of passage at the School that introduces students to the intellectual community, at which she and a panel of faculty members discussed the classical text Antigone. Meanwhile, Gallatin's faculty and administrators are singing her praises. Professor Laura Slatkin, who served as chair of the dean's search committee, said, "Susanne Wofford's leadership, intellectual vitality, and distinguished research and teaching record will confirm and strengthen Gallatin's singular mission."
Yu echoed, "It was clear to all of us who met her during the search that she would be a visionary leader, innovative administrator, and extraordinary contributor to the NYU landscape. Gallatin is in for a treat."