Behind the mahogany-paneled doors and plastered walls of the English Department's offices in Sanborn Hall is the office of professor Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, chair of the department since July 2006. Gerzina succeeds Peter Travis and on the door of her office hangs a small blue sign: "Enter at your own risk. My room is full of English majors." Her bookshelves are filled to the brim with 18th- and 19th-century novels, including authors from Wharton to Wilde, as well as three different versions of Emily Bronte's classic, "Wuthering Heights."
Gerzina was recently awarded the George Eastman Visiting Professorship to Oxford for 2009-2010, an award given to only one American professor every year and only bestowed upon three other women since its inception in 1929. She will arrive in Oxford in the fall of 2009 and will stay there until the following spring. The press release is set to be issued Thursday.
Gerzina came to Dartmouth from Barnard College in 2005, where she served as director of Pan-African Studies, as well as a professor of English. Prior to Barnard, she taught at Vassar College for 14 years, serving as associate dean of the faculty and director of Africana Studies. Both colleges are historically female -- Vassar, which was founded as a women's college, became coeducational in 1969, and Barnard was founded in 1889 as the sister of Columbia University.
"There was a history at Barnard and Vassar that embraced young women and their education. There's a different history at Dartmouth," she said, noting that Dartmouth was historically a male institution.
Gerzina is the first female English chair at Dartmouth and the first female African-American English chair in the Ivy League. She said that while she doesn't have a specific philosophy about running the department, she wants what is best for both the students and the faculty.
"It's important to put everyone on a safe and equal footing," she said. "I just want to make the department a peaceful place where people can get work done."
Gerzina was asked to be chair during her first term as a professor at Dartmouth, an honor which she said eased the transition process.
"I held administrative positions at Barnard and Vassar, and I brought those skills with me to this position," she said. "It's easier to take over when you start with a clean slate, though. I had a year to get to know people here, which helped a great deal."
The English department recently finished a self-study and will be conducting an external review at the end of November, a process which Gerzina said will help to analyze the department's state as a whole. She noted that the department has recently experienced turnover among its faculty, which has attracted promising new hires, including creative writing professor Tommy O'Malley.
Gerzina grew up in Springfield, Mass., but has lived in California, Montreal, New York, and England. Upon coming to Dartmouth, she and her husband settled in Thetford, Vt. She said that Dartmouth's setting influenced her decision to accept a position at the college.
"When my husband and I first built our house in Guilford [Vt.], we drove to Hanover and around the Dartmouth campus, and I said, 'This is just too good to be true.'" she said. "I think everyone has a natural environment, and New England is mine."
Her latest work, a fully annotated version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1909 novel "The Annotated Secret Garden," was published by W. W. Norton two weeks ago. Another of her works, Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary 18th-Century Moved out of Slavery and Into Legend, will be published by HarperCollins in January 2008.
