Rate My Professor Albert Fairbanks

A. Harris Fairbanks is Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, specializing in Nineteenth-Century British Literature among other areas including William Blake, rhetoric and composition, political rhetoric, and poetry. His research interests focus on Romantic and Victorian Literature and Culture, William Blake, political rhetoric, and systems of rules such as geometry, chess, and parliamentary procedure. Fairbanks earned his A.B. from Swarthmore College in 1962, M.A.T. from Johns Hopkins University in 1963, M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967, and Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1972 with a dissertation titled "The Romantic Ode: A Study of the Form." His professional career at the University of Connecticut began in 1970 as an Instructor, followed by Assistant Professor from 1973 to 1976, and Associate Professor from 1976 to retirement. He served as Director of Freshman English from 1976 to 1984, Director of the UConn Study Abroad Program in London in 1987-1988 and 1994-1995, Associate Head of the English Department from 2003 to 2010, Interim Department Head from January to August 2009, Departmental Hearing Officer, and member of the CLAS Committee on Curriculum and Courses and Undergraduate Council.

Fairbanks authored the book Fact, Value, Policy: Reading and Writing Argument (McGraw-Hill, 1994). His articles include "Ontology and Narrative Technique in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled" (Studies in the Novel, 2014), "Was Thomas Paine a Source of Dostoevskij’s 'Legend of the Grand Inquisitor'?" (Russian, Croatian and Serbian, Czech and Slovak, Polish Literature, 2000), "Blake, Burke, and the Clanrickard Monument" (Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 1998), "The Pedagogical Failure of Toulmin's Logic" (The Writing Instructor, 1994), "Macroreading" (Connecticut English Journal, 1978), and works on Coleridge such as "The Form of Coleridge's 'Dejection Ode'" (PMLA, 1975), "'Dear native brook': Coleridge, Bowles, and Thomas Warton the Younger" (The Wordsworth Circle, 1975), and "Coleridge's Opinion of 'France: An Ode'" (Review of English Studies, 1975). He delivered a keynote address on writing and ethics in 1987, presented conference papers on rhetoric and political discourse, and coordinated conferences on heuristics, critical thinking, and writing funded by the Connecticut Humanities Council. Honors include a 1980 UConn Research Foundation grant and a 1973 Summer Faculty Fellowship.