A Surprising Relocation
Standing in Sunday sunlight with a colleague who asked how I was adjusting to life in Durham and at Duke, I smiled and said North Carolina can be a surprising place. I came to Duke as a visiting professor of English in 1998. My home and place of employment at the time were Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. The Duke English department was under severe scrutiny by the media. Many of its star faculty had departed for points North and West. Morale among students and colleagues in the department was not at its best. But Professor Marianna Torgovnick, the chair of the department, was upbeat. She proclaimed there was going to be a splendid new formation of the English department, and that I was going to be a part of it. "Hah!" I thought, "When my visit is over, I am headed home to Philadelphia, to cheese steaks, the Liberty Bell and my old job!" Man makes plans. Duke laughs. In the spring of 1999, my wife Charlotte Pierce-Baker and I signed on for permanent faculty posts at Duke. It was a surprising move for us. We had been in Pennsylvania for a quarter century. Why did we relocate?