Who is Dean Wallace?
Who is Dean Wallace?
September 2010
Associate Dean of Graduate Students and Professor of English Tara Ghoshal Wallace is fascinated by British culture, which is easy to understand considering she’s the daughter of an Oxford-educated Indian civil Service officer who served the British Raj before joining the government of independent India. But, what about Paul McCartney? We caught up with Wallace recently to learn more about her roles as dean, accomplished author, and . . . Beatles fan.
As dean of graduate studies at Columbian College, tell us about your typical work day.
With 45 doctoral and professional programs serving almost 2,500 students, I spend the majority of my time communicating and meeting with program directors and chairs, responding to the questions and needs of students, and working through the funding, data, and admissions concerns that affect our policies.
I love working with faculty on their creative and productive ideas. We work to revamp existing programs and to develop new ones. For example, we’ve revised the Environmental Resource Policy Masters Program to be one of the strongest in the field, and we’ve established two new certificate programs: Medicine, Society, Culture and Applied Quantitative Risk Analysis. And we have seven new programs in the proposal stages.
Congratulations on the publication of your book, Imperial Characters: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature . Please tell us a little bit about it and what inspired and compelled you to write it.
Postcolonial scholarship in the last three decades has changed the way we view literature and culture in every period. My own contribution to this valuable discussion is to tease out ways that 18th-century British writers inscribe in their texts anxieties about imperialism’s effect on British national character. I wanted to complicate the notion that writers like Alexander Pope and Daniel Defoe are simple cheerleaders of imperial adventurism, and I also wanted to consider how English and Scottish writers connect imperialism to "Britishness." This book was much harder to write than my previous books [on Jane Austen and Frances Burney], but I can honestly say that I learned more about history, politics, and imperial geography from writing this than I ever thought possible. I hope readers will, too.
Describe your current research and its significance within your discipline.
My next subject is Sir Walter Scott, specifically, how his novels construe and construct monarchy. Since Scott was the most widely read novelist of the 19th century, his representations of monarchs—whether Richard I in Ivanhoe or Mary Queen of Scots in The Abbot—had a huge impact on how historical and present monarchies were understood. Scott’s influence in this regard is exceeded only by Shakespeare’s construction of the Tudor monarchy.
What advice do you have for incoming graduate students?
My advice to entering graduate students is simple: Recognize what a treat you’re in for and do everything you can to take advantage of the resources available to you.
This is going to sound nerdy, but I truly believe that graduate study is the best time of life! When else can you focus on a subject that you’re passionate about and be in a position to share that passion with equally enthusiastic peers as well as experts in the field? I urge entering graduate students to ask questions and seek help whenever they’re uncertain—we’re all here to help.
What is the one thing about you or your work that would most surprise people?
I’ve met and chatted with Paul McCartney! We were staying at the same beach resort. Being of the Beatles’ generation, this was a personal thrill.
