English Department Faculty Win Three ACLS Fellowships

This year, more than 1,000 scholars applied to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a nonprofit federation of 68 national scholarly organizations, for a coveted ACLS fellowship. Of those scholars, 65 got what they hoped for, and 3 are from the College of Arts and Sciences English department. 

“We are a little, bitty department,” says James Winn, a professor and chair of the English department and one of the fellowship recipients, “and four of us have won in the last two years.”

Last year’s fellowship and one of this year’s, Winn points out, was the particularly prestigious Ryskamp Fellowship, created to help junior faculty advance their research. Associate Professor Andrew Stauffer, whose  work focused on how changes in record-keeping impacted British literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was last year’s Ryskamp winner. This year only 12 Ryskamp Fellowships were given out; the BU winner, Assistant Professor Maurice Lee, will explore 19th-century American literature to chronicle how the idea of chance impacted a society.

Professor William Carroll, this year’s third recipient, will focus, through Shakespeare’s work, on England’s fears and struggles with the succession to the throne, especially after the death of Elizabeth I. Winn is writing a cultural history of the reign of Queen Anne, with attention to literature, music, drama, art, architecture, journalism, religion, and politics.

BU Today talked with Lee about 19th-century American literature and the emergence of chance.

BU Today: What did you propose to research?
Lee: I proposed writing about the effects that changing notions of chance had on 19th-century American literature. Those changes occurred at two levels: at the theoretical/philosophical level with mathematics and biologists like Darwin, and at the cultural level, insurance industries are blossoming, the stock market is blossoming, gambling is taking on more prominence, and then you have events like the Civil War, which through experience really brings home to many people that we live in a chancy, uncontrollable, chaotic universe. And within this milieu of ideas and cultural practices, you have Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Edgar Allan Poe all taking chance into account as they write.

How are they taking chance into account?
Their attitudes toward chance vary author to author and text to text. In Poe’s detective fiction, like “The Purloined Letter” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he specifically mentions probability theory. Melville in Moby Dick talks about fate and free will and chance as being the three forces that govern the world. One of the ways that people face the challenge of chance is through statistics. Thoreau ends up doing a lot of data-gathering at the end of his career, and it’s a way for him to try to predict and find out what nature’s laws are. Sometimes they’ll celebrate it, these beautiful, wonderful moments of surprise. That’s what I think Dickinson is about, where the unexpected and the unpredictable inspire you. At the same time, the unpredictable can be absolutely debilitating and deadly. These authors, I think, and it makes sense to me, were both attracted and repulsed by control and predictability.

How were explorations of chance received by readers of the 19th century?
Part of the energy of the authors I’m dealing with in the 19th century is that it really is a controversial subject, and their culture is just getting used to the idea. A lot of readers would consider it sacrilegious, and all of the authors that I’m writing about, with the exception of Dickinson, who published almost nothing in her lifetime, were accused of being impious. This is a main story of the 19th century in Europe and America, which is that God is slowly dying. In the 18th century, science and religion could generally be seen to cohere. In the 19th century, it became increasingly difficult to maintain the belief. And chance is part of that, because to say that something is without a cause strikes at the heart of a lot of Christian cosmology.

What led you to this exploration?
I was at the University of Missouri before I got this job, and I was outside of a restaurant waiting for a table to open up and I was proselytized by an Evangelical Christian. I got to talking with him, comparing our different worldviews, and it turns out that he didn’t believe in chance and I did. It was strange for me to think of someone who really didn’t believe in this concept. And then I started seeing the idea of chance in other places.

So your chance encounter led you to an idea for a book about chance?
I would call it a chance encounter, but he would call it providential.

How are contemporary authors dealing with chance today?
They’re more comfortable with it as a reality. I think they believe in chance more thoroughly than the 19th century did. Part of the energy of the authors I’m dealing with in the 19th century is that it really is a controversial subject, and their culture is just getting used to the idea.

Do you have a favorite 19th-century American author?
Melville. He struggled intensely with the crisis of faith in his time. The famous quote from Hawthorne is: “He could neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

What’s the most interesting thing about Melville’s struggle?
Particularly in English departments, we work at a strange historical moment. We both rely on the authority of our knowledge and live in a time when we’re very skeptical about the authority of knowledge, and so what does it mean to stand up in front of a class and to tell them that truth doesn’t exist? In a negative view, it’s hypocritical. In another view, it’s paradoxical. From an intellectual point of view, it’s incredibly productive to think about the limits of our knowledge, and chance is one way of naming that boundary.

Nicole Laskowski can be reached at nicolel@bu.edu.