UpDate - Vol. 14, No. 6, Page 1
October 6, 1994
Barbara Gates selected third alumni professor
Barbara Gates, professor of English, has added another first to
the list of titles and honors she has gathered in her more than 20
years at the University of Delaware.
Known as the teacher of the University's first course in women's
studies in l971, Gates is now the first woman professor named an
Alumni Distinguished Professor, the third professor to be recognized
with the award. She also is the first alumna to hold the chair, having
earned her master's degree from the University in 1961.
Gates says the award, which recognizes excellence in teaching and
extraordinary commitment to students, means "more than I can say."
"I have never in my life not wanted to go into a classroom on any
given day," Gates says. "A friend of mine once told me, 'Barbara, you
should pay the University for the privilege of teaching. You love it
so much.'
"Teaching is," the Victorian scholar says, "always challenging,
always different and endlessly interesting."
It is Gates' commitment to change that keeps her courses in an
ever-evolving state. She is just as likely to change the topic she
teaches each semester as she is to change the content of any given
course.
"Take the Bronte sisters," she says, "They died young and wrote
seven novels. You might think that's pretty cut and dried, but there
are always changes to be made, always new discoveries to include."
In material submitted to support her nomination, Gates writes,
"To my mind, the ideals and hopes of our student body have
changed...Even more radically...the profession of English has changed.
If students are less likely to be readers and to have a well-developed
historical sense-and I believe that they are-English is more likely to
have been theorized beyond the interests of most undergraduates.
"Both of these changes require considerable shifts on the part of
the teacher, shifts that ask for more than a simple lessening of
reading requirements or ignoring of the complexities of theoretical
discourse.
"As a consequence, I have found myself redoing my courses in
terms of both content and style, so that the texts I use 'talk' to
each other in new ways and create a cultural context that brings the
present to the past and vice versa," she said.
"I no longer feel that coverage is imperative in the way that I
used to. Instead, I believe in a kind of easing and sinking into the
texts, reviewing them from multiple points of view is primary."
In addition to her dedication to changing the content of core
courses, Gates is known for her innovative course development. Over
the years, she has taught or team-taught a number of unique courses
designed around what she calls "a wedding of my avocations and
vocation."
Among these courses are ones in landscape and nature poetry,
poetry and ecology, nature writing, nature and Victorian poetry,
ecofeminism and team-taught courses in nature and human nature,
landscape awareness, landscape and literature.
Gates also has been a leader in the University's development of
women's studies, and in support of her nomination for this
professorship, Kate Conway Turner, current director of the Women's
Studies Interdisciplinary Program, wrote, "Motivated by the need to
develop a curriculum within women's studies and inspired by the many
voices that were among the scholars seeking the development of women's
studies, Dr. Gates was one of the founders of women's studies at the
University of Delaware. She and others saw that our students hungered
for an understanding of how gender impacted knowledge and information
across disciplines. She was among the first to step forward and teach
women studies' courses. Thus in 1971, she launched the first women's
studies course. Later, she team-taught courses in those early years as
women's studies began to develop here at the University of Delaware."
Additionally, Gates was one of the first University professors to
introduce Native American writing into the curriculum and has taught
across cultures in all of the introductory genre courses in English.
Additionally, she has team-taught some of her Victorian courses with
professors in sociology and art history.
In all courses, she says she tries to "relate the literature of
the past and of other cultures to our own culture, encouraging
students then to relate their milieu and individual lives to the works
being studied."
Although Gates has lost track of the number of graduate and
undergraduate students she has mentored over the years, she cites as
her proudest moment the year her dissertation candidate Maria Frawley
won the Sypherd Prize for the best dissertation in the humanities. It
also was a year when two of the students in her Bronte course were
chosen to participate in the Research on Women day, and one won the
first prize in the contest for the Rosenberry Award in writing-based
on a paper for one of Gates' classes.
In her support of Gates' nomination, Frawley, now on the faculty
at Elizabethtown College, wrote, "Now that I teach at a liberal arts
undergraduate college, I appreciate even more the strengths that
Barbara brings to the undergraduate classroom. Hers stand out from
many others I have observed in terms of the vitality of the students
and the level of sophistication that is expected of them and that they
learn, under Barbara's model, to expect of themselves. I can't count
the number of times that undergraduates have in my presence run up to
Barbara (e.g., in her office, walking to class, working in the
library) to tell her about what they have been reading or thinking
about lately."
Gates refers to herself as a teaching scholar and says, "As we
work together, drawing upon those areas which I myself am pondering
and writing, I have found that my students have often enriched,
inspired and challenged me, rather than the other way around. I am
deeply attached to the art of teaching as communication, and I am
genuinely fond of students as people. These dual attachments often
make the hardest days brighter."
In addition to her teaching and revising of courses, Gates is
hard at work on three new books: one on Victorian women writers and
nature, another a volume of essays on how women through various
centuries have popularized science and a third on ecofeminism-a
selection of literary texts.
Her previous books include Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad
Histories, published by Princeton University Press in 1988; Critical
Essays on Charlotte Bronte, published by G.K. Hall in 1989; and
Journal of Emily Shore, published by the University of Virginia Press
in 1991.
Additionally, Gates has published numerous articles and given
numerous lectures on topics ranging from Wordsworth to landscape and
literature, cultural attitudes toward suicide and the Brontes.
She has served on numerous committees at the University and has
been a consultant in teaching excellence and distinguished academic
service for the Department of Education of Pennsylvania.
At the University, she has been honored with the excellence in
teaching award and the E.A. Trabant Award for Women's Equity.
Gates has been teaching at the University since joining the
faculty as an assistant professor in 1971. She became a full professor
in 1988 and has also served as a visiting professor at Monash
University in Melbourne, Australia, and at the University of
California at Davis. She served as the acting director of the Women's
Studies Program in 1992.
Gates received her bachelor's degree in English and history from
Northwestern University in 1958 and her master's from Delaware in
1961. She received her doctorate as a Danforth Fellow at Bryn Mawr
College in 1971.
-Beth Thomas