A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, presented “‘Una América Total’: New World Encyclopedism in the 1970s” at the American Comparative Literature Association conference, held online June 15-18, 2022.
Provost Jonathan Levin’s essay “Robert Frost and Pragmatism” appears in Robert Frost in Context, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge University Press, 2014). The essay focuses especially on Frost’s relationship with Harvard psychologist, philosopher, and public intellectual William James, whose influence on American literary modernism Levin addresses more generally in his 1999 book The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism. This new critical volume, part of the Literature in Context series from Cambridge, offers a fresh, multifaceted assessment of Robert Frost’s life and works. Nearly every aspect of the poet’s career is treated: his interest in poetics and style; his role as a public figure; his deep fascination with science, psychology, and education; his peculiar and difficult relation to religion; his investments, as thinker and writer, in politics and war; the way he dealt with problems of mental illness that beset his sister and two of his children; and, finally, the complex geo-political contexts that inform some of his best poetry.
Levin has spent more than 20 years in higher education, including nearly a decade as an administrator. Most recently, he served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Drew University in Madison, N.J.
I am very excited to be joining such a vibrant, highly regarded academic community,” Levin said. “I look forward to working with students, faculty and staff to further enhance and bring distinction to Mary Washington.”
As the chief academic officer at UMW, Levin will be responsible for oversight of all academic programs, academic planning and budgets and faculty matters. Working with the deans and the faculty, the provost provides leadership of major university initiatives in teaching, research and creative activities and has responsibility for all university educational and academic policies. He also will oversee enrollment management.
Prior to Drew, Levin held administrative and faculty positions at State University of New York at Purchase, Fordham University and Columbia University. Levin earned a bachelor of arts in English and French from the University of Michigan, a master of arts in English from the University of California at Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University.
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News release prepared by: Brynn Boyer