| James Engell |
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Co-Editor
Chair, Department of English  Jim Engell teaches courses in romantic poetry, eighteenth-century studies, rhetoric, and environmental issues. At Harvard, where he serves as chair of the Department of English, he has received four faculty-wide individual teaching and advising prizes. For the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History he has taught, with Glenn Adelson, a course on American environmental history and its pertinence for environmental issues today. He has lectured on environmental education in the US, Japan, and China.He began his studies leaning toward science. Experiments he conducted indicated that untreated biodegradable detergent harms fish more than untreated non-biodegradable detergent, and later research confirmed these findings. On a short-term National Science Foundation fellowship at the Jackson Laboratory, he participated in a study of genetic predisposition to cancer. After receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in the humanities, he has, since 1978, taught literature at Harvard. He has also chaired the degree program in History & Literature, and served on the Committee on the Study of Religion. Among his books are The Creative Imagination (1981), The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values (1999), and, with Anthony Dangerfield, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (2005), which won in 2007 the Association of American Colleges & Universities Ness Book Award for best book on liberal education. He edited, with W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1983). Numerous articles include one on Coleridge, “Imagining into Nature: ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.’” For Harvard’s recent curricular review he wrote “Only This: Connect,” an essay on the need and advantages of teaching the arts and sciences together. Jim Engell has served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics and is a member of the Cambridge Scientific Club and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife Ainslie live on a small farm in Acton, Massachusetts. They have two grown children. |