Renaissance Scholar Is First Ryan Professor
 Jonathan
Gil Harris, associate professor of English, was recently appointed
the first Robert Ryan Professor in the Humanities. The first endowed
professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences, it was
made possible by a generous bequest from Robert Ryan, who taught
in the history department for 42 years and inspired students and
faculty with his integrative vision for the humanities. The professorship
requires completion of a project and is awarded on a competitive
basis. Harris, whose project is titled "Etiologies of the Economy,"
was cited for the breadth and depth of his scholarship and excellence
in the classroom.
Harris will begin his three-year term next fall. His research
for the project will further work he has presented to students
in such courses as the honors seminar Bodies of Knowledge, in
which he offers an interdisciplinary approach to ways of "knowing"
the body. He plans to redesign that seminar as well as his courses
in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, and to complete his
next book, Etiologies of the Economy: Dramas of Mercantilism
and Disease in the Age of Shakespeare. Harris's approach is
highly interdisciplinary, "plotting links between pathological
medicine, drama, and mercantilist economics." He does not dwell
in the Renaissance alone, however: "The connection between the
past and the present is crucial not only to my research but also
to my teaching. I seek to make this connection in all my classes,
but I have felt this urge particularly in the wake of September
11. I feel more than ever the need to pay attention to the histories
of problematical rhetorical configurations such as the foreign
and the global, the sick and the natural, the patriot and the
renegade."
Harris came to IC in 1990 after completing his graduate work
at the University of Sussex in England. Although he misses friends,
family, and the sun and ocean of his native New Zealand, he finds
the hills, forests, and lakes of central New York acceptable terrain,
and his Renaissance fieldwork takes him to favorite dark and dusty
haunts, like the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
Harris is also at home on the stage, both acting and directing.
At IC he directed a "completely cross-gendered!" production of
The Taming of the Shrew.
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