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Stanford Report, June 2, 2004

Polhemus elected Faculty Senate chair

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Robert Polhemus

BY RAY DELGADO

Robert M. Polhemus, the Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities, has been elected chair of the 37th Senate of the Academic Council.

Joining Polhemus on next year's senate Steering Committee will be Phyllis Gardner, medicine; Albert Camarillo, history; Harry Elam, drama; Andrea Goldsmith, electrical engineering; Roger Noll, economics; and Doug Osheroff, physics. Provost John Etchemendy will serve as an ex officio member of the committee.

Elected to the Advisory Board were Stephen Galli, pathology; Wanda Corn, art and art history; and David Kennedy, history, who was elected for a second term.

Polhemus, who currently chairs the English Department, holds bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from the University of California-Berkeley. He has been a member of Stanford's English Department since 1963.

He is the recipient of the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching and has served as a member of the Appointments and Promotions Committee, chair of the design and review committee for the Program in Cultures, Ideas and Values, and chair of the editorial board of the Stanford University Press.

Polhemus' research interests include 19th-century British literature, 20th-century British fiction, cultural studies and the visual arts, including film. He is particularly interested in the study of desire, love, comedy, cultural psychology, and the seeking and rendering of faith in literature and art. His work centers on fiction and art as a means for exploring, expressing and satisfying the longing for secular faith in the last two centuries.

Polhemus has written on such authors as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, among others. He has just finished a book to be published by Stanford University Press later this year titled Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption and Women's Quest for Authority. The book explores a particular biblical paradigm to developing modern attitudes toward family, culture and father-daughter, older-men­younger-women relationships and deals with a wide range of figures, including biblical characters, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Sigmund Freud, Shirley Temple, Woody Allen, and Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The book also explores feminist history and conceptualizations of daughters in literature, art, life and films.