By John Manley and Maddie Parker
Richard Nash has, in his words, “held every position imaginable” at Indiana University. Arriving at IU in 1986, Dr. Nash climbed the ranks of the professoriate, held departmental directorships, and has been a member of IU’s Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies since its inception. He, of course, taught quite a few students as well.
When asked about his favorite classes to teach, Dr. Nash responded: “Too many to count.”
In these many courses, however, he relished the opportunity to invent new class themes and incorporate unique pedagogical techniques, many of which he linked to current events to encourage in students an appreciation for “making sense” of literature as it was written in its given socio-cultural and -political milieu. Dr. Nash ensured that this focus on historicity permeated the class apart from lecture periods – indeed, in one memorable class, he asked students to journal as a way for them to consider their historical value in their time. What Dr. Nash misses most about teaching, however, are the discussions, the aspects of academia that are “energizing” and “illuminating” in a way that, he says, no other intellectual work is.
Away from the classroom, Dr. Nash’s pioneering scholarship has brought understudied facets of literary and cultural history to the forefront of eighteenth-century studies. His monograph Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (2003) revolutionized the study of “wildness” as it tracked descriptions of ferality throughout eighteenth-century sources, from novels to pamphlets to court documents. Wild Enlightenment won the coveted Walker Cowen Manuscript Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies and, years after the monograph’s publication, Dr. Nash was invited to the Sorbonne to attend a conference on feral children where he was able to witness the impact that his earlier work had on contemporary scholarship.
Dr. Nash’s research is not solely focused on literary and cultural history, however. Indeed, his more recent work in animal studies has earned him much acclaim both in the United States and across the Atlantic. Working on the development of horse racing, Dr. Nash has dramatically revised scholarship on the history of the Jockey Club, an organization that focuses on Thoroughbred breeding and racing in the United Kingdom. His 2015 The Heath and the Horse: A History of Newmarket Heath was written alongside renowned historians of horse racing and led to a noteworthy experience: Dr. Nash was invited to meet with the Jockey Club in Newmarket itself, the prominent eighteenth-century racetrack in Suffolk, U.K. Most recently, Dr. Nash has been invited to curate an exhibition on the Thoroughbred breeds for an online museum on the construction of horse breed identity, a project that asks crucial questions of origin, breed, and race. Dr. Nash’s interest in Thoroughbred horses transcends just research – he has recently been following the progress of his own young horses as they begin their riding training in California and Utah.
When she was hired at IU Bloomington in 1990 as the Program Coordinator at the Learning Skills Center, Kathy Smith wasn’t exactly optimistic about her future in the Department of English. She mused during a recent interview, “I thought, ‘I have as much of a chance of getting a job in this department as I have to grow wings.’” Thirty years later, she retired as Clinical Associate Professor of English, the Director of Administrative and Instructional Affairs, the Director of Basic Writing and Special Programs, and Composition Program Coordinator. Daedalus would be proud.
Even before she graduated with her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1988, Dr. Smith decided she wasn’t interested in being a conventional scholar: “I understood myself as a teacher and administrator, fundamentally.” To that end, she honed those skills at Mizzou, brought them to bear at IU, and the results speak for themselves. In 1995, after only three years in the English department where she served officially as a “part-time” professor, the university administration took note of her sterling work and offered her a position as Associate Dean at the College of Arts and Sciences. She turned the promotion down and stayed in English, partially to direct the department’s writing programs: “I wanted to work with the graduate students and the undergraduates in our Groups Program. I loved working at that level.” A few years later in 2001, she would begin an unbroken 15-year stint as associate chair of the English department, establishing herself as the cornerstone of numerous successful administrations. “Kathy made my job so much easier,” said one former chair, “I don’t think we could have accomplished the things we did, hired the amazing people we did, without her work behind the scenes.”
But any student or faculty member that’s spent time with Dr. Smith knows she was most at home in the classroom. Her undergraduate classes were exciting and challenging – “I had one rule: no wallflowers” – but also honest spaces that developed into communities: “All of my classes were their own communities, inside jokes and all.” Her influence as a teacher was perhaps most felt in her capacity as director of Basic Writing and Special Programs, a program she helmed for over twenty years. Amongst those who worked with her she will be remembered for empowering the undergraduates in those programs and the graduate students who taught them. Furthermore, through her efforts in Special Groups, many graduate students acquired summer funding and valuable teaching evaluations, delivered with her characteristic honesty and faith in their (sometimes nascent) abilities: said one former student, “she never sugar-coated anything in our meetings, but she also had my back and I always knew it.”
Dr. Smith won’t miss teaching online or the administrative paperwork, but she’ll dearly miss her students, whom she dreams of regularly: “I have dreams about teaching – I dream about it so much! I’m brilliant in 75% of my dreams. 25% of the times I’m unprepared and awful.” Yet retirement isn’t so bad. No classes mean no weekends spent grading papers: “I’ve recaptured my Sundays,” she laughs, “for the first time in years I’m able to watch PBS on Sunday nights.”
When asked in a recent interview to name his proudest moments or favorite memories during his 35 years of service to the IU Bloomington community and the Department of English, Stephen Watt (or Steve, as we know him) chose two rather different moments in a career full of highlights: his part in planning, overseeing, and eventually serving as Associate Dean for the fledgling School of Art, Architecture + Design here at IU, and successfully teaching Finnegans Wake in a graduate seminar.
Undoubtedly the latter seems the more impressive accomplishment to those of us in the English department, but perhaps just as impressive are the highlights that didn’t make the cut: any of Dr. Watt’s 14 books, more than 50 published articles and reviews, chairing around 20 successful dissertation committees (and serving on around 40 more), five successful years as chair of the English department, two more years as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the list goes on.
Dr. Watt’s route to IU was an unusual one. His graduate education began in tiny Laramie, Wyoming where he received his M.A. in English literature before applying to English Ph.D. programs around the country. He would eventually turn down an acceptance to Cornell’s English Ph.D. program (“They didn’t fund me, and my dad said ‘Are you crazy? You’re not going there!’”), opting instead to enter the program at the University of Illinois, where he graduated in 1982. When Dr. Watt arrived at IU in 1985, he established himself as an important contributor to the burgeoning field of Irish Studies, often pairing that scholarship with his interest in drama and theater to produce many of his early articles, culminating in his second book, 1991’s Joyce, O’ Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater. Many years and many books later, and after authoring more than a few canon-altering contributions, Dr. Watt was characteristically modest about his influence on a field of study he helped establish: “I like to think I contributed to a fuller understanding of Irish popular performative culture’s influence on the modernist moment.” Yet there is more to Dr. Watt’s oeuvre: one would be remiss in not mentioning, for instance, his impressive 2015 study, “Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious, or his multiple books on the state of higher education in collaboration with Cary Nelson. His current work (perhaps his most audacious yet) aims to marry contemporary political critique to literary and cultural studies, foregrounding Seamus Heaney, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump, among others.
Prolific scholarship aside, Dr. Watt is remembered fondly by his colleagues in the College of Arts and Sciences as “a model university citizen,” notable for his “hands-on approach to the day-to-day work,” but also as an “honest broker” who piloted many successful projects to safe harbor through the turbulence of university politics. Undergraduate and graduate students alike will miss his lively classrooms, and his colleagues in Ballantine will remember his many years of service: “He worked so hard for the benefit of everyone while balancing such a full plate…just an extremely generous person.”
The College of Arts