The scholar of American literature had a special talent for connecting with colleagues and students alike.
以斯拉欧他是纽约大学的英语教授 澳门威尼斯人网上赌场 who had a knack for connecting with students and whose work helped define the “American style” of literature, is being remembered as a teacher of substance with a style all his own.
塔威尔于1月23日死于黑色素瘤. 他享年56岁.
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.
凯瑟琳曼海姆，主席 英语系, recalls Tawil leading sessions with groups of incoming students and deftly encouraging them to reveal themselves with a playful icebreaker: “Tell me something weird about yourself.”
“He got people to share the weirdest stuff—strange talents, 痴迷, 集合,曼海默说. “I think it was because he was so open and warm and just set that tone.
“They trusted he would tell them all the weirdest stuff about himself and would accept whatever they said and think it was cool.”
Tawil was as much a serious scholar of early American literature as he was a student of American pop culture.
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’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America sitting on his desk, and an oversized copy of the iconic 生活 magazine cover depicting a rapt film audience wearing 3D glasses in 1952.
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.
塔威尔是一位技艺精湛的音乐家和天才魔术师, 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’d intuitively shuffle a deck of cards while on department video conference calls.
“Ezra was somebody who I would say most people found impossible not be attracted to, 不想待在你身边, 不管他们对他了解多少,” 约翰迈克尔, the John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Rochester. “他有一种特殊的温暖和活力, 加上很多的洞察力和智慧, 这让他非常引人注目和独特.”
使美国文学“新鲜而令人兴奋”
Tawil was born the fourth child and only son of Fred and Sally Tawil in Brooklyn, 纽约, 并在那里的叙利亚犹太社区长大. At his bar mitzvah, he performed an elaborate magic show.
He graduated with high honors from Wesleyan University in 1989 and went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate in American civilization from Brown University.
Prior to joining the faculty at Rochester in 2011, 他在卫斯理大学英语系教书, 哈佛大学, 和哥伦比亚大学.
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.
他的第一本书， The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (剑桥大学出版社), 2006), makes a case for how the popular “frontier romance genre” of American fiction in the early 19th century provided the foundation for a seismic shift in racial thinking in the United States.
“By the mid-nineteenth century, when slavery emerges onto the national political stage . . . race had moved beneath the skin, into the blood, the essence,“读 一个评论 published by the University of Chicago Press. “所有这一切都悄无声息地发生, 不可见, except in the popular literature of the day where Tawil finds the evidence of the transformation at work.”
在他的第二本书中， Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic (宾夕法尼亚大学出版社, 2018), Tawil confronted how Americans can claim “a national literature” distinguishable from other literatures written in English.
“Tawil makes a convincing case that the logic of style—adopting something but ‘wearing’ it differently—allowed post-Revolutionary Americans to grapple with their cultural indebtedness while making the case for their national uniqueness,“读 一个评论.
The topic, colleagues say, in many ways mirrored Tawil’s approach to scholarship and pedagogy.
“That there is a particularly American style of literature is a very old topic,” Michael says. “But 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.”
塔威尔留下了他的妻子, Kirsten Lentz; a 13-year-old son, 朱尔斯, 还有他的姐妹们, 艾德丽安, 罗宾, 和乔伊斯.
