Literary Journal, Editor to Move from UVA to Texas A&M
Charlottesville, Va.
Dr. Charles H. Rowell, professor of English and editor of the acclaimed literary journal of the African Diaspora Callaloo, has announced that, as of late August, he will relocate the journal from its current home at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., to the campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.
Rowell’s decision has sent shock waves through the University of Virginia’s English department, which earlier this year lost its leading postcolonial scholar, Dr. Tejumola Olaniyan, to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Rowell says that he is “very excited” about the forthcoming move, noting that he has been receiving letters of welcome from A&M faculty ever since his decision was announced July 10.
Rowell was apparently swayed both by the levels of financial support that Texas A&M could offer and by his sense that “the administration and faculty there fully understand and respect the purpose, mission and goals of Callaloo as an African Diaspora forum with a number of projects oriented toward developing writers and audiences of contemporary literature.
“Not infrequently during these past several years, I have reflected with regret on the plantation economies in which I and Callaloo have found ourselves: isolated from the society’s ‘center,’ starved for resources, stranded on the (institutional) back porch,” Rowell added. “Yes, it is time. Time for us to move on, move forward to a place that not only sees the shape of the future but wants to have a hand in shaping it.”
Officials at A&M echoed Rowell’s enthusiasm.
“It was my privilege to be the one who proposed to the provost, a year ago, that we try to bring Dr. Charles Rowell and Callaloo to Texas A&M,” says Dr. Janis P. Stout, dean of faculties and associate provost at Texas A&M. “I had, of course, been aware of the quality and importance of the journal, and I saw this as the kind of opportunity that can be the watershed in the life of an institution. Moreover, Dr. Rowell himself is a scholar of great personal depth and magnetism. I look forward to working with him and with the journal with the greatest anticipation and delight,” she added.
Callaloo was founded 25 years ago at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and moved with Rowell to the University of Kentucky and then to the University of Virginia. It is the oldest continuously published journal devoted solely to African American and African Diaspora arts and letters in the history of American literature.
— By Kendra Hamilton
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