A Note from Our Chair, Winter 2025 | Habiba Ibrahim

Greetings from Padelford Hall, where I have been settling into the role as department chair. It is truly an honor – and an awesome responsibility – to lead a department that is as large, multi-faceted, and dynamic as English. I left New York – along with the bone-chilling winters and the humid-sticky summers – to join the UW English department over 18 years ago. In 2006, I arrived as an early-career scholar of contemporary African American literature. New to both the profession and the Pacific Northwest, life at the University marked a great beginning. As I write to you now, I am reminded of a hopeful openness – a sort of lightness – of those early days. Of course, this is a new moment, and we face new challenges. While the challenges ahead of us are daunting, we have the good fortune of being resourceful. Our faculty find new ways to fulfill our educational mission, produce cutting-edge scholarship, create literary art, and offer their expertise to the world. As long as we can imagine a better world, we can begin again.

I would like to extend a word of gratitude to my predecessor, Anis Bawarshi, who served as department chair for six years with diligence and compassion. Under his leadership, the department made tremendous strides. These include numerous faculty hires, the revision of our undergraduate curriculum, the creation of Technical & Professional Communication courses as a foundation for a new minor, a mentoring program for English majors who are interested in teaching careers, and many other exciting developments. Our new undergraduate curriculum has been a great success with increased student enrollments. As we build on all we have accomplished and turn the page, I have great appreciation for a whole team of leaders. These include our new Associate Chair, Michelle Liu, and directors of our numerous programs: Stephanie Clare (Director of Undergraduate Studies), Eva Cherniavsky (Director of Graduate Studies), Nikki Crouse (Director of Creative Writing), Suhanthie Motha (Director of MA in TESOL/Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), Stephanie Kerschbaum (Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric), and Megan Callow (Director of the Program for Writing Across Campus). I am inspired by their commitment and hopeful about what we can achieve together.

In winter 2025, we welcome our newest faculty member, Rhema Hokama. Professor Hokama is a scholar of early modern English literary and religious history, and the author of Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation: Poetry, Public Worship, and Popular Divinity (Oxford University Press, 2023). This academic year, we are conducting our latest faculty search in the Program for Writing Across Campus (PWAC).

Our department has hired thirteen new faculty over the last few years – a new generation of scholars. Seeing the future of the department in this way reminds me of a moment in Julie Dash’s classic 1991 film, Daughters of the Dust. At the edge of change in 1902, some members of the Gullah Peazant family stay on the island where their African ancestors arrived while some leave for the modern mainland. But the past is not severed from the future. As the family elder, Nana Peazant, claims, “We are two people in one body. The last of the old and the first of the new.” Perhaps it takes a robust cultural imagination to connect this film’s lyrical depiction of black modernity to the life of an English department. In September 2024, one of my first acts as department chair was to host an Emeritus Luncheon for newly retired faculty, who will always have a place in our department community. This year’s retirees include John Griffith, Richard Kenney, and Henry Laufenberg. They have all made significant contributions to the department and profession, which have helped pave the way for where we are.

There is so much to say about all that lies ahead of us, where we have been, and what we can do. It is an honor to reflect on the 50 years since the original publication of Shawn Wong’s groundbreaking volume, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. And it is a pleasure to see our faculty and students embark on new directions: I think of Cristina Sánchez-Martín and Taiko Aoki-Marcial’s community-based learning project that focuses on the function of storytelling, and a research cluster that Prof. Callow is leading this year on generative AI and the teaching and learning of writing. 

There is so much to say. In this new moment, we can look back at where we have been and look ahead to where we want to go. The late poet Nikki Giovanni offers language, metaphors, and reason with which to imagine the multiple possibilities of now. The opening stanza of “The Laws of Motion” (1970) helps me think it through:

 The laws of science teach us a pound of gold weighs as   

much as a pound of flour though if dropped from any   

undetermined height in their natural state one would

reach bottom and one would fly away

The laws of science – and the conditions of a human-inhabited world – can determine whether we remain inert or are set into motion. I know we are moving. We can drop into the depths with either gravitas or despair, or we can fly with a hopeful sort of lightness. We can decide – it is in our nature.