{"id":591932,"date":"2024-02-05T11:16:02","date_gmt":"2024-02-05T16:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=591932"},"modified":"2024-02-13T13:12:24","modified_gmt":"2024-02-13T18:12:24","slug":"ezra-tawil-english-professor-of-substance-and-style-remembered-591932","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/ezra-tawil-english-professor-of-substance-and-style-remembered-591932\/","title":{"rendered":"Ezra Tawil, English professor of substance and style, remembered"},"content":{"rendered":"

The scholar of American literature had a special talent for connecting with colleagues and students alike.<\/h2>\n

Ezra Tawil<\/a>, an English professor at the University of Rochester<\/a> who had a knack for connecting with students and whose work helped define the \u201cAmerican style\u201d of literature, is being remembered as a teacher of substance with a style all his own.<\/p>\n

Tawil died January 23 of melanoma. He was 56.<\/p>\n

As the director of graduate studies for the English department, Tawil mentored students with warmth and humility in equal measure. His approach, colleagues say, enabled him to bond with students in a way that set him apart.<\/p>\n

Katherine Mannheimer<\/a>, the chair of the Department of English<\/a>, recalls Tawil leading sessions with groups of incoming students and deftly encouraging them to reveal themselves with a playful icebreaker: \u201cTell me something weird about yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe got people to share the weirdest stuff\u2014strange talents, obsessions, collections,\u201d Mannheimer says. \u201cI think it was because he was so open and warm and just set that tone.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey trusted he would tell them all the weirdest stuff about himself and would accept whatever they said and think it was cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tawil was as much a serious scholar of early American literature as he was a student of American pop culture.<\/p>\n

Anyone who entered his office on the fourth floor of Morey Hall in the days before he died would have found a copy of Henry Highland Garnet\u2019s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America <\/em>sitting on his desk, and an oversized copy of the iconic Life<\/em> magazine cover depicting a rapt film audience wearing 3D glasses in 1952.<\/p>\n

At the foot of his desk sat a gray dog bed reserved for Misha, his black therapy dog for whom he kept an Instagram page. Tawil maintained residences in Rochester and Manhattan, the latter being where he lived with his wife and their son.<\/p>\n

Tawil was a skilled musician and gifted magician, pursuits he honed as a youngster and that continued to enchant him in adulthood. People closest to him recall Tawil as a boy making his pet bird disappear and reappear; as an adult, he\u2019d intuitively shuffle a deck of cards while on department video conference calls.<\/p>\n

\u201cEzra was somebody who I would say most people found impossible not be attracted to, not to want to be around, no matter how well or how little they knew him,\u201d says John Michael<\/a>, the John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Rochester. \u201cHe had a special kind of warmth and energy, combined with a lot of insight and intelligence, and it made him really compelling and unique.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making American literature \u2018fresh and exciting\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Tawil was born the fourth child and only son of Fred and Sally Tawil in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the Syrian Jewish community there. At his bar mitzvah, he performed an elaborate magic show.<\/p>\n

He graduated with high honors from Wesleyan University in 1989 and went on to earn a master\u2019s degree and a doctorate in American civilization from Brown University.<\/p>\n

Prior to joining the faculty at Rochester in 2011, he taught in English departments at Wesleyan, Harvard, and Columbia universities.<\/p>\n

Tawil authored two books and edited two more during his career. Eight essays and articles he wrote appeared in a variety of scholarly journals and publications.<\/p>\n

His first book, The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance<\/em><\/a> (Cambridge University Press, 2006), makes a case for how the popular \u201cfrontier romance genre\u201d of American fiction in the early 19th century provided the foundation for a seismic shift in racial thinking in the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the mid-nineteenth century, when slavery emerges onto the national political stage . . . race had moved beneath the skin, into the blood, the essence,\u201d read one review published by the University of Chicago Press<\/a>. \u201cAll of this takes place silently, invisibly, except in the popular literature of the day where Tawil finds the evidence of the transformation at work.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his second book, Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic<\/em><\/a> (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Tawil confronted how Americans can claim \u201ca national literature\u201d distinguishable from other literatures written in English.<\/p>\n

\u201cTawil makes a convincing case that the logic of style\u2014adopting something but \u2018wearing\u2019 it differently\u2014allowed post-Revolutionary Americans to grapple with their cultural indebtedness while making the case for their national uniqueness,\u201d read one review<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The topic, colleagues say, in many ways mirrored Tawil\u2019s approach to scholarship and pedagogy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat there is a particularly American style of literature is a very old topic,\u201d Michael says. \u201cBut one of the things that characterized his work was his ability to return to a topic like that and make it both fresh and exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tawil is survived by his wife, Kirsten Lentz; a 13-year-old son, Jules, and his sisters, Adrienne, Robin, and Joyce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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