Congratulations to Professor John Webster, who retired this past Winter! Professor Webster received his B.A. from UCLA in 1967; he received a M.A. from UC Berkeley in 1969 and a Ph.D., also from Berkeley, in 1974. He joined the faculty in the UW English department in 1972. In his over 53 years at the University of Washington, Professor Webster has the distinction of effectively establishing two careers: first as a scholar of early modern poetic forms and the editor and translator of William Temple's Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1984), and second as a scholar on the teaching and learning of writing. Below, former English Department chair Gary Handwerk reflects on John's remarkable career.
John Webster’s legacy to UW’s Department of English and to the university as a whole places him among the most eminent teachers this campus has ever seen. From 1972 through 2025, he provided superb instruction to thousands of UW undergraduate and graduate students—as inventive and effective a classroom presence as any teacher I have ever encountered. But his impact stretches far beyond that. John played a leading role in many of the most important improvements in instructional infrastructure seen at this institution—lasting changes that will benefit students and faculty for decades. While serving in key roles such as Director of UW’s Expository Writing Program (now named Program for Writing and Rhetoric), Director of Writing for the College of Arts and Sciences and leader of the Writing Ready Program, he worked tirelessly to find ways not just to help students read and write more capably and confidently, but to build those goals into a guiding purpose of the entire university.
John’s excellence as a teacher stemmed in part from his avid study of the process of learning—what works, what doesn’t, and why. His reading ranged across fields from psychology and neurology to education and the humanities, and he had a gift for translating the theoretical insights he gleaned into the rigorously practical and impactful classroom activities. Co-teaching with him was a consistently illuminating experience, watching a master practice his craft in creative and dynamic ways. No two classes were ever the same, as John perpetually devised original strategies for working with students to match each new setting, each new group of students. As he taught students, simply noticing more attentively as we read is a key step in acquiring analytical rigor. John was an early adopter of metacognitive pedagogical strategies as well, drawing from his participation as a founding member of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
The structural changes spearheaded by John include the foundation for the leadership and curricular structure of UW’s composition program, reduction of class sizes in writing courses, design and establishment of the Odegaard Writing and Research Center (a novel collaboration of writing teachers and library research staff), invention of the role of Director of Writing for the College of Arts and Sciences (a position he filled from 2004 through 2018), and development of the Early Fall Start Writing Ready Program for first-year students. On campus, he created the 4x4 Writing Program for faculty, where multiple members of specific departments worked together to embed writing across their curricula. Beyond campus, he served as UW Director of the Puget Sound Writing Project in which summer workshops brought together dozens of teachers from the K-12 system.
Across his entire career, John enacted inclusivity as a core value—evident, for instance, in the range of variants of English he included in his popular History of the English Language class. He pioneered active student learning activities long before they became an educational norm; his orchestrated in-class read-arounds of paper drafts are just one example of his ingenious implementation of a powerful pedagogical idea. The hours he spent in his office with students, where he acted as teacher, mentor and friend for dozens of them every year, surpass measure. He translated what he learned from those conversations into pedagogical wisdom, recognizing how the psychological barriers to writing (who among us doesn’t experience writer’s anxiety?) needed to be addressed explicitly if its effects were to be countered. Among the first faculty on campus to seek ways to support international students and their linguistic diversity, he developed teaching practices that honored students’ language repertoires and led faculty workshops that reoriented instructors’ understanding of “error” as a productive part of writing growth. His study of the Chinese language and his friendships with former students led him on multiple trips to China.
John Webster is, above all, a humanist in the best sense of that term, genuinely humane, a scholar with roots in the Latin tradition who successfully taught everything from Spenser’s Faerie Queene to contemporary stage versions of Shakespeare. His spring tours for alumni of the London theatre scene were renowned; his role in establishing and sustaining the English Department’s study-abroad programs in London was indispensable. It is a privilege for all of us who have known him to have shared his professional journeys.
- Gary Handwerk, May 2025