The scholar of American literature had a special talent for connecting with colleagues and students alike.
Ezra Tawil, an English professor at the University of Rochester 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.
Tawil died January 23 of melanoma. He was 56.
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.
Katherine Mannheimer, the chair of the Department of English, 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, obsessions, collections,” Mannheimer says. “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 Life 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.
Tawil was a skilled musician and gifted magician, 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, not to want to be around, no matter how well or how little they knew him,” says John Michael, the John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Rochester. “He had a special kind of warmth and energy, combined with a lot of insight and intelligence, and it made him really compelling and unique.”
Making American literature ‘fresh and exciting’
Tawil was born the fourth child and only son of Fred and Sally Tawil in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the Syrian Jewish community there. 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, he taught in English departments at Wesleyan, Harvard, and Columbia universities.
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.
His first book, The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (Cambridge University Press, 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,” read one review published by the University of Chicago Press. “All of this takes place silently, invisibly, except in the popular literature of the day where Tawil finds the evidence of the transformation at work.”
In his second book, Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 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,” read one review.
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.”
Tawil is survived by his wife, Kirsten Lentz; a 13-year-old son, Jules, and his sisters, Adrienne, Robin, and Joyce.
