HAVING SERVED two previous terms, both as co-director (with Elliott Professor of Rhetoric and Humanities Lowell T. Frye) and director of the Rhetoric Program, Elliott Professor of Rhetoric and Humanities Elizabeth J. Deis last spring completed her third term (2004- 20007) as director. During her latest stint, she organized and oversaw an external review of the Rhetoric Program. She drew on her experience as the longest-serving director of the Rhetoric Program in its thirty-year history to write, with Dean of the Faculty Earl W. Fleck, an article on “Assessment of the Rhetoric Program at Hampden-Sydney College,” which appeared in a volume entitled Good Practice in Program Review Case Study (2006), edited by Marilee J. Bresciani.

Deis also served as a member of the College’s Quality Enhancement Planning Committee and channeled much of her research and writing energy in the fall of 2006 into drafting and revising the Quality Enhancement Plan,“Preparing Good Men and Great Leaders for a Culturally Diverse World.” The Quality Enhancement Plan was prepared as part of Hampden-Sydney’s ten-year accreditation review by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). Drawing on this experience, she also presented a paper—“SACS’ QEP as a Writing Assignment”—at the annual national conference of Writing Program Administrators in July 2006.

In addition to these efforts, Deis, again with Frye, presented a lecture at the College in the fall of 2005 on “Don Quixote in the Nineteenth Century” as part of the 400th anniversary commemoration of Cervantes’ great novel. During her sabbatical leave in the fall, Deis undertook several projects. She organized a panel, “Town and Gown: Teaching Civic Discourse in Prince Edward County, Virginia,” which was accepted as part of the Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, in October. Other members of the panel included Associate Professor of History Caroline S. Emmons, as well as Longwood University’s Susan Booker, who taught Rhetoric at Hampden-Sydney College for several years, and Heather Rust. Deis’s paper is entitled “Teaching Civic Discourse by Engaging with the Public: Hampden-Sydney College’s Symposium on the Prince Edward County School Closings.”

Deis also devoted some of her research time to her long interest in 19th-century British literature, writing an essay, “Caroline Norton’s ‘The Sorrows of Rosalie’ and the Victorian Tradition of Exploring Marriage through Literature,” for inclusion in a collection of essays on Victorian Women Poets and the Problem of Marriage, edited by Dianna Vitanza and Amy Watkin. Finally, Deis wrote a review for the Victorians Institute Journal of two books— Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class by John Kucich, and The New Woman and the Empire by Iveta Jusovà.

In addition to his work with Deis, Frye during the past two years has continued his research in the field of 19th-century British literature, especially the work of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), influential British historian and man of letters. In April 2006 Frye delivered a paper, “The Topography of Loss: On Editing Thomas Carlyle,” at the annual meeting of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association at Rutgers University. His essay “‘Vocables, Still Vocables’: Linguistic and Religious Despair in Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets” appeared in January 2007 in a double issue of Literature and Belief devoted to the work of Thomas Carlyle. In July 2007, Frye gave another paper, “Thomas Carlyle: Biography as History, History as Biography,” as part of an international conference at Villanova University on Thomas Carlyle Resartus: Reappraising Carlyle for Our Times.

During his sabbatical leave in the fall, Frye revised and expanded the last paper for publication and continued his work as co-editor (with John Ulrich of Mansfield University) of Thomas Carlyle’s Essays on Society and Politics. The volume will be published by the University of California Press as part of the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Works of Thomas Carlyle.

Frye also began researching and drafting a paper to be delivered next year in Dumfries,
Scotland, on Carlyle’s Life of Sterling.

Deis and Frye have continued to conduct their annual summer workshop for new and some veteran teachers in the Rhetoric Program, as well as one-day workshops every semester that train faculty from across the curriculum to score the Rhetoric Profi ciency Examination. As co-directors of the Writing Center, they conduct training workshops for peer tutors, supervise the peer tutors, and also tutor regularly in the Writing Center themselves. In addition, both regularly teach in the English Department, the Western Culture Program, and the Honors Program.

In the spring Frye concluded a three-year term, including two years as chair, on the faculty’s Committee on Professional Development, in which capacity he had the opportunity to see the quality and variety of research being done by faculty across the curriculum.

Deis and Frye both came to the College in 1983 and were promoted to the rank of professor in 1999. After Deis received her bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary, and Frye received his from St. John’s University, they both earned their master’s degrees and doctorates at Duke University. At Commencement in 2006 Frye received the College’s Cabell Award “in recognition of outstanding classroom contribution to the education of Christian young men.”

BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty