Award-winning English Professor Rosamond S. King Named New Director of the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute

Rosamond S. King, an associate professor in the English department, has been tapped as the new director of the college’s Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities. King is only the institute’s second permanent director. She takes over this fall. Robert Visusi, a faculty member in the English department who had headed the institute for more than 35 years, stepped down last semester.

The Wolfe Institute supports excellence in research, publication, teaching, and all forms of academic discourse on campus. It also sponsors a variety of lectures, seminars, colloquia, and conferences as well as faculty fellowships.

"It’s the intellectual heart of the campus," says King of the center. "It helps to make conversations happen outside of the classroom that connect people across departments, and also connects all of us on campus to issues happening around us."

King will start instituting a yearly theme for the institute’s programming, starting with "the body" this year. "From biology to sociology, we can all share a conversation around a shared theme," she says, adding that she’d like to try to engage graduate students more so that they can be a greater part of the intellectual life of the campus. She also wants to engage the digital humanities—by posting relevant links to published pieces, TedTalks, and the like—in order to greater facilitate faculty members who would like to create lessons following talks.

King, who joined the college’s faculty in 2008, has won many awards, including most recently a Lambda Literary Award, the signature honor of the nation’s leading organization advancing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer literature, for her poetry book Rock|Salt|Stone (Nightboat 2017). She was also recently named to the board that is planning the first LGBTQI museum in New York City as well as joining the the Stonewall 50 consortium, which is planning activities and outreach to commemorate the historic Stonewall uprising and the legacy of the LGBTQI civil rights movement.

Her book, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (University Press of Florida, 2014) won the 2015 Caribbean Studies Association’s Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis prize for the best Caribbean Studies book. Her next scholarly book will look at black women in Trinidad in the 19th century, connecting their participation in carnival and street protests. She is also working on another book of poetry about the range of experiences of black people in America. In the English department, she teaches courses in Caribbean and African literature, creative writing, sexuality, performance, and immigrant literature.

She says she is "poised to connect the breadth to the humanities and the arts on campus in a world that often doesn’t see the value of those fields."