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Four named Distinguished Professors
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
Four UB faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences have been named SUNY Distinguished Professors by the SUNY Board of Trustees.
They are Charles Bernstein, David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters in the Department of English; Francis D. Fincham, professor and director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology; Susan Howe, professor in the Department of English, and Dennis Tedlock, James H. McNulty Professor in the Department of English.
The designation as distinguished professor—a rank above full professor and the highest in the SUNY system—denotes exceptional contribution in an academic field through publications, national and international research presentations, research findings and the training of students.
A UB faculty member since 1990, Charles Bernstein has a longstanding international reputation as one of the world's foremost figures in the field of poetry and poetics. He also is noted as a founder of "Language Poetry," recognized as one of the most significant poetic developments of the 20th century. His work continues to be anthologized widely and is taught regularly as a component of contemporary poetry courses around the nation.
His scholarship has received a number of important honors and he has received prestigious fellowships, including those from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the University of Auckland Foundation. He also was the recipient of the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize from the University of California at San Diego, an honor bestowed for lifetime contribution to poetry and scholarship.
Bernstein has published 25 poetry collections (as author or collaborator) and four essay books, and has edited 11 collections of critical and theoretical essays on poetry and poetics. His work has been featured in more than 60 prominent poetry anthologies and in nearly as many collections of critical and theoretical essays. Beyond his extensive service on important editorial boards, he co-edited (with B. Andrews) the groundbreaking journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Sought after both as a critic and as a reader, in the past two years, he has appeared as the featured reader at nearly 25 universities, book festivals and poetry projects ranging from the New York City Poetry Project to France's Museum for Franco-American Relations.
Prior to joining the UB faculty, Bernstein taught at Princeton, Queens College (CUNY) and the New School for Social Research. He also has been a visiting lecturer or writer-in-residence at the University at Auckland, University of California at San Diego, Brown University, Temple University and Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing.
He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard College.
Frank Fincham is an internationally pre-eminent scholar in the field of interpersonal relationships, especially in the area of family therapy.
Specializing in marital and family dynamics, he continues to revolutionize the field by introducing an approach that emphasizes individual perception of interpersonal relationships, improving upon the traditional model of relying solely on analyzing observed behavior. He was the forerunner in evaluating cognitive "attributions" in marriage relationships—a process that has since become the standard model used by family psychologists. This method gauges how partners in a marriage think about each other and the extent to which they attribute blame for family problems to each other.
More recently, he has expanded his study to see how children perceive and are affected by their parents' spousal conflict. He is the originator of Parents and Children in Transition, or PACT, a program that provides social support and education about divorce and teaches coping skills, free of charge, to children of the nearly 3,000 divorce cases handled annually by Erie County courts.
Fincham, who joined the UB faculty in 1999, has published more than 170 book chapters and articles in refereed journals, and frequently contributes to reference handbooks widely used by social psychologists. He has received numerous lifetime achievement awards, among them the International Network on Personal Relationships' Berscheid-Hatfield Career Award for sustained, substantial and distinguished contributions to the field of personal relationships. The American Psychology Society has named him one of the world's top 25 psychologists.
He earned both undergraduate and master's degrees in South Africa before pursuing doctoral work at Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
Susan Howe is a globally renowned American poet whose work has etched an indelible mark on American literature and scholarship. Her multi-faceted philosophical and technical innovations in poetry and prose have been widely praised.
Her work has been broadly anthologized and published by New Directions, publishers of such world-renowned literati as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Hermann Hesse and Octavio Paz. Howe's writing is noted for challenging literary conventions and readers' expectations. Her 1985 work, "My Emily Dickinson," has dramatically altered literary scholars' understanding of the 19th-century poet, transforming the figure of Emily Dickinson from an icon of genteel femininity to a poet studied and celebrated for the force and unusual powers of her perception.
Howe has 15 volumes of her poetry in print. She has received numerous honors and tributes, including a Guggenheim fellowship and designation as Distinguished Fellow at Stanford's Humanities Center. In 1999, she was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2000 to the American Academy of Poets' Board of Chancellors.
Howe, who first came to UB as a Butler Fellow in 1988 and joined the faculty the following year, holds an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland (Dublin)—a first for an American poet. She is a graduate of the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.
Dennis Tedlock, who holds a position as research professor of anthropology in addition to the McNulty Chair, is internationally renowned for his founding contributions to the field of ethnopoetics, the study of poetic language across cultural and linguistic boundaries.
His work is most acclaimed for transcending conventional divides between the sciences and the humanities. He was one of the first to attend to the problem of translating oral performance. In an effort to capture the performance component of storytelling, he created a system of notations to account for the musical qualities of voice inflection. The result is a series of transcriptional conventions that continue to be studied and applied today.
His extensive scholarship includes eight books and 103 articles, pamphlets and reviews. He has edited three journals in his field, including the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, American Anthropologist, for which and his wife, Barbara, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology, were awarded the Associations' President's Award. He has been awarded several National Endowment for the Humanities grants and fellowships, a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, the PEN Translation Prize and the Elsie Clews Parsons Folklore Prize. His "The Dialogic Emergence of Culture" (edited with Bruce Mannheim) has been credited with transforming the way ethnographers approach their work.
Tedlock joined the UB faculty in 1987 after holding academic appointments at Boston University, at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and at Yale. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of New Mexico and a doctorate from Tulane University.