This fall 2007 faculty convocation was a high point in the history of the department as we basked in the reflected glow of Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope's high award. His deeply personal speech accepting the University's Award of Excellence is below. You'll find his comments poignant and, like Marcel himself, modest and sincere. At the convocation, President Trani singled out Marcel's reference to leaving Romania with just two suitcases, calling it "moving" for the way it understated an enormous and courageous undertaking as Marcel and Micaela began to "reinvent" themselves in the United States. Our heartfelt congratulations to Marcel. Terry Oggel, Chair VCU Department of English

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The following remarks were given by Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope upon accepting the University Award of Excellence at the annual faculty convocation, September 25, 2007.

President Trani, Provost Gottfredson, Vice President Retchin, Dean Holsworth, English Department Chair Terry Oggel, Colleagues, Family and Friends,

My wife and I came to the United States twenty-four years ago, with two suitcases filled with whatever we thought was necessary for one year’s work teaching and researching at the University of Northern Iowa as a senior Fulbright lecturer. We left behind a personal library of books in several languages and our students and colleagues at the Timisoara University where both of us had been teaching English literature and language for more than a decade. We were also forced to leave behind our young children who were kept as hostages by the communist regime. One year later, I filed for political asylum, managed to reunite my family and started the complex project of reinventing my career as a teacher and writer in the US.

The following five years were spent in anxious attempts to relaunch my teaching and research in the United States, first at the University of Northern Iowa, then at Harvard as an Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellow. In 1988, I was appointed Associate professor in the VCU English Department and the rest, as they say, is history. In Romania my publications won two national awards but had to face continuous political pressures and censorship. By contrast, the last two decades spent at VCU have been the most stimulating and productive for me as author, editor of an award-winning journal, coeditor of a multi-volume transnational literary history, chair of the English department and, more recently, as director of an innovative interdisciplinary PhD in Media, Art, and Text. As I noted in an interview, a common feature in all these activities was my active engagement with and redefinition of boundaries between disciplines and arts. “I . . . see myself as a builder of intellectual bridges: between criticism and pedagogy, between theory and practice, between literature and other cultural and artistic media."

None of this would have been possible without the continued collaboration and encouragement of my colleagues and the talented staff in the department and other units of the University; nor without the generous support of president Trani, who from the beginning believed in the idea of an interdisciplinary confluence of media, art, and text, of Dean and then Provost Gottfredson, of Dean Holsworth, Dean Toscan, and Dean Boudinot, of senior Associate Deans Hawkridge and Seipel, of Mass Communications director Judy Turk, and of three English department chairs—Jim Kinney, Richard Fine, and Terry Oggel—who have all guided and sustained my work over the past two decades. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Catherine Ingrassia, Associate Dean and English department colleague, who has given generously of her time in putting forth a strong proposal for this award, but who was also instrumental in supporting and moving forward a number of our initiatives.

I would argue that, more than in the case of a University teaching or scholarship award, a University Award of Excellence is a collective achievement which measures the success of an entire institution in creating optimal conditions for the pursuit of new projects and ideas. I would like, therefore, to share this award with all of you, faculty and students who have contributed to the work for which I’m being recognized today. I would also like to share it with my wife Micaela and daughters Anca and Oana, present in the room, who have been my generous guides and advocates over the years, allowing me the space and freedom to reinvent myself.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you.