Remarks at Richard P. Veler Endowed Chair Investiture
By Professor of English Cynthia Richards
September 29, 2022
I am so fortunate today to have so many parts of my life come together in one room and at one time. I see among the people here Wes Babian and Kent Youngman, who I work with on the board of the Rocking Horse Community Health Center. I see Braeden Bowen and Aimee Maruyama, both members of my campaign team during my run for state representative in 2020, and two of the most creative people I know. Melinda Barnhardt, class of ’65 and a dear friend, was one of the people who encouraged me to run and who I continue to work with on issues of social justice in our community, including ending gun violence. Larry Ricketts is here. He was also one of my strongest supporters and someone I work with on People for Safe Water, a local group that works to ensure safe water in our community. And I see Linda Butler who I served with on the board of Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio—a hellraiser—who fights for reproductive rights.
I see some former students, some I had the great pleasure of teaching, and others I just got to admire from afar. I see many of my colleagues, and I am so grateful that you are here. Every year, my students invigorate me, but my colleagues sustain me. From the time I first arrived in 1995 and saw professors, like Dick Veler, in action, I knew that Wittenberg set a higher standard for excellence in teaching and dedication to craft than other like institutions—it IS what makes us distinctive—and every entering class of new faculty lives up that expectation. And I think even the famously modest Dick Veler would allow me to say that my colleagues in the English Department are the best of the best: no one gives their students more. Thank you, my department, for being here to celebrate with me what I see as our shared honor: the creation of the Richard P. Veler Chair in English—an acknowledgement among so many of our generous alumni of the importance of his work and how the study of literature and a dedication to the craft of writing shaped them for the better.
My two best friends are also here, Staci Rhine in Political Science and Robin Inboden in English. From having heard her introduction, I doubt I need to explain to you why I value Robin’s friendship so much. Robin cares deeply, and gives enormously, and I am so fortunate that I and my family are among the people she cares so deeply for. Staci is just as caring and giving, although I imagine right, now, she is squirming a little because I am being a little too sentimental (which I am prone to do.) And speaking of being sentimental, the most important person in my life is here: my husband, Adam. When we came to Ohio 27 years ago, we made a shared commitment to this place. For many years, Wittenberg nurtured us and our two children, Lily and Samuel, and let us all pursue our dreams. I am so proud of the extraordinary people my children have become, and I am so proud of the work Adam does at the University of Dayton, teaching law and working with the Center for Human Rights. It is cliché to say it, but nothing I have achieved would have been possible without his support.
Indeed, what this award acknowledges and what Dick’s legacy represents is that none of us is singular and none of us achieves anything alone. We are the composite of all the parts of our lives, and our work reflects the world around us. Dick embodied this, as teacher, a scholar, an administrator, a university editor, and a much valued member of the Wittenberg and Springfield communities. When I first interviewed at Wittenberg, what, in part, attracted me to this place was just how full my colleagues’ lives were. The message was that we are people first, and then the work we do. I think this must be, in part, what former Wittenberg president Baird Tipson meant when he called Dick the “conscience of the university” –that our elemental humanity must always define us. I remember learning this from Dick early on, when he helped me see past my anger with a student who likely cheated in my class to find a way to help this student learn a better way, or the very last time I saw Dick, when deeply embarrassed by the attention he was soon to receive as the recipient of Wittenberg’s Medal of Honor, and likely picking up on my nervousness about reading his citation, he asked me about myself, and by the time we had arrived at graduation hollow, it was I who felt special on his special day. Later, when he had to leave the podium because he was not feeling well, I was reminded, again, of just how kind and decent a man he was.
As I grew into my job, I came to understand the path he took, what putting, as he called it, the “flesh and blood on literature” and teaching “life lessons” meant. It meant making the classroom experience engaging, making sure students understood what was at stake in our readings and how it related to their lives and their decisions. But it also meant living the lessons we taught in the classroom, modeling the type of real-world engagement that we espoused in our classes through doing community service and through the research and scholarship we undertook.
After 9/11 and the wars commenced in Iraq and Afghanistan, I vowed to teach a course on war each year until the wars ended. It seemed important to remember that we were a country at war. That commitment meant a realignment of my research agenda. In 2001, I published my first edited collection, one which paired the final work of the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft with the memoir of her life written by her husband, William Godwin. I had edited that collection during my second pregnancy and during the first year of my son’s life, and that focus on the rights of women and how we navigate all the complexities of our gendered identities remains central to my teaching and my research. But the shift to a focus on war led me in new directions as well. One cannot address war without addressing the effects of violence and the trauma that often ensues. My next book was an edited collection on Aphra Behn’s late seventeenth-century novel, Oroonoko, the story of an African prince enslaved in Surinam, and the wars which inaugurated the transatlantic slave trade, and a brutal history of racialized slavery that continues to shape our nation. That work, I would later argue in my most recent edited collection, Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (2021), is a trauma narrative, as are so many accounts of early modern suffering. Yet eighteenth-century historians and literary scholars alike had often “normalized” this suffering, ignoring the potential for its continuing effects by representing it as contained and consistent with the ethos of its time and place. That narrative is changing, in part, because of my book.
It was only recently that I was able to retire my course on war, and I replaced it, happily, with ones on narrative medicine and on the body in the eighteenth century. These courses fit firmly within the emerging field of Health Humanities, my new focus as a teacher and scholar. How is it that we use our skills as close readers and attentive listeners to help others heal? How is it that narrative provides solace and understanding, and can this narrative power be used to address the needs of patients and medical professionals alike? I can imagine Dick making a joke here, perhaps, that maybe I took putting “the flesh and bone” on literature just a little too literally, but I also think he would recognize in my work an attempt to find in the literature we both loved the life lessons that make us better.
I know he would be so grateful, as am I and as is my department, that you—the alumni of this university—recognized the immense value of what he gave to you as a teacher, as a mentor, as a friend, and that you have ensured that his work in the humanities will continue. We are people first, and then the work we do, but when these things align—when our work becomes the place where we can experience the fullness of being human—the world is a better place. Thank you for the honor of being the first to represent Dick’s extraordinary legacy.