By Laura Sanicola
For the second time in three years, the Fordham College Rose Hill Honors Program will welcome a new director. Dr. Eve Keller, professor of English at Fordham College, has been named the new Director of the Honors Program of Fordham College Rose Hill. She is slated to begin her role in the fall of 2015.
“I’m pleased, I’m honored; frankly, I’m humbled,” said Keller. “I’m looking forward to adventures ahead.”
Keller, who joined the Fordham faculty in 1989, is heavily involved both at Fordham and in the greater academic community. She is a past president and current executive committee member of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), a national academic organization that fosters discussion about the cultural and social interconnections between the sciences and humanities. She is the author of Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England and the co-author of Two Rings: A Story of Love and War, a memoir of a Holocaust survivor.
At Fordham, Keller is a member of the Faculty Senate and its Executive Committee, as well as the Core Curriculum Revision Committee, which was responsible for the formation of the current undergraduate core curriculum. She serves as the associate chair of both the English undergraduate and graduate programs, and is the Fordham liaison to the Folger Shakespeare Library Consortium.
Keller has been a professor in the Honors Program for over 20 years, where she specializes in Medieval Literature. She was involved in the formation and development of the unique curriculum as well as the Ignatian Education seminars, which were designed to give honors students the opportunity to reflect on their experiences at Fordham by interacting with key texts from the Jesuit tradition of liberal arts education. She also has served as an advisor to seniors writing their theses. Currently, her research is centered on the cultural meanings of blood research in the seventeenth century.
Keller will be replacing Dr. Matthew McGowan, professor of classics at Fordham College, who announced his departure in early February. McGowan will be on sabbatical leave next year to finish his book on the history of dictionary writing and then will return to the Department of Classics and Classical Languages and Civilization. McGowan became honors director after Dr. Harry Nasuti, professor of theology, in fall 2013.
“It is also a privilege and joy to direct the Honors Program, where I have gotten to know so many wonderful people on the faculty and in the administration, and I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Fordham’s finest,” McGowan wrote in an email to the honors program.
“And yet, the greatest privilege and deepest joy for me has been having the chance to work so closely with…the honors students, and there is so much about [the] interaction — both scheduled and serendipitous — that I will miss in leaving honors.”
Founded in 1950, the Fordham College Honors Program has provided a select group of students with a unique core curriculum of English, philosophy, history, art history and music history beginning with ancient studies and ending in contemporary studies in Western Civilization. The capstone of the honors curriculum is the senior thesis, an extended research project prepared under the individual guidance of a faculty mentor in one’s major field. As director, Keller will work with the dean of Fordham College Rose Hill, members of the AJCU Conference of Honors Programs and the National Collegiate Honors Council.
