Professor John Watkins Retires

In early December, on a Zoom call with 50 some students, Professor John Watkins is wrapping up his popular “End of the World in Literature & History” class with a discussion of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. As usual, he sets the scene, 15 minutes before class start, with music: this time from the Klezmatics, a modern klezmer group with a Kushner connection. As usual, he sports a suit and tie. The professor starts by reminding his audience of the myth of apocalypse they have spent the semester exploring. Then he is off to the races, weaving history, religion, and literary analysis with the humor, dramatic emphasis, and off-the-cuff eloquent wisdom that have wowed students and colleagues for decades. 

The students don’t know it yet, but Watkins is retiring, and this class is the last he will teach as a tenured professor at the University of Minnesota. 

“Now, I'm going to be popping in doing guest lectures and things like that, so never say never,” the early modern scholar confides in a Zoom interview a week later. “I don't think [Professor of Italian] Susanna Ferlito would ever speak to me again if I didn't do my annual Death in Venice lecture for her ‘Imagining Italy’ class.

“Teaching is a joy,” he continues. “I'm going to miss that engagement. The conversations with students, that moment they take ideas and run with them. I love planning new classes. I love teaching new stuff: I love that mutual process of discovery that happens.”

Joyful is also a word students use to describe the professor’s teaching model. “Always, Dr. Watkins has been a vote of confidence and encouragement in my life,” says 2024 PhD graduate Clara Biesel, “consistently bringing me back to the joy of exploration, as we think about these works, and the pleasure we can all feel in thinking about them together.”

Watkins has been honored with teaching awards at every level, from the English department’s Ruth Christie Award to the College of Liberal Arts’ Motley Exemplary Teaching Award to the University’s top Morse-Alumni Award for Outstanding Contribution to Undergraduate Education. “John’s skill as a teacher is legendary among students,” says English Professor and former Chair Andrew Elfenbein. “He famously lectures without notes, and is able to move effortlessly among numerous languages.”

Watkins’ early teaching methods were shaped by his PhD studies at Yale University, where the English department focused on high formalism. “Thou shalt do close readings,” he describes. But at Minnesota Watkins rediscovered an interest in history (part of his Marshall Scholarship studies at Oxford, before Yale) and began integrating questions of context and influence in the classroom. “That's where I really found my own,” says the professor, who later regularly taught History courses here. “I think I also became much more comfortable getting away from class objectives,” he adds. “If students bring up something, and it's good, scrap that lesson plan. I became a much better listener.”

While Watkins led decades of students through Shakespeare and the British Literature survey, in recent years his teaching has turned to more contemporary topics. In 2018, he began regularly teaching the centuries-spanning “The End of the World” lecture he first created as a seminar in 1999. A scheduling snafu led to a course on the modern short story—which he happily taught three more times. He taught a capstone seminar on T. S. Eliot and war. “I became an English major because I loved Eliot,” he says. “Bad politics, all of that stuff, I don't ignore it, but I love that poetry. It was a great joy to be able to teach that and to, you know, be the English professor I had dreamed of becoming.”

Building graduate student confidence

Watkins served as director of English Undergraduate Studies and twice as director of Graduate Studies, with another stint as DGS of Italian. Another honor, he says, has been watching so many graduate students he mentored find jobs and publish books. 

Hamline University’s Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Professor of English Marcela Kostihova (PhD 2005) was one of those students. Recruited and advised by Watkins, Kostihova credits him for providing support and modeling collegiality to her cohort, who still support and celebrate each other’s successes: “Thanks, John, for inspiring generations of new faculty! You might retire, but your spirit lives on, rooted across universities large and small.” 

Graduate students who ultimately chose careers outside of academia also felt Watkins’ unwavering support. “I find so much of what I learned from John coming in handy as a program development manager at Medtronic,” says Amanda Taylor (PhD 2017). “I consider myself incredibly lucky to have called him my advisor and now to call him friend.”

“You taught me through the playfulness of your conspiratorial arched eyebrow as well as your supportive generosity when the going was tough,” says Linda Shenk (PhD 2002), Professor of English at Iowa State.

Scholarship and collaboration 

Shenk and Professor Katherine Scheil co-edited the 2024 festschrift Early Modern Improvisations: Essays on History and Literature in Honor of John Watkins (Routledge), a wide-ranging collection that showcases the McKnight Distinguished University Professor’s strong connections to and influences on scholars here and abroad.

If Watkins’ first book, The Specter of Dido, focused closely on the English poet Spenser, his second, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England, reflected the shift in interest toward history that had transformed his teaching. Described by peers as “interdisciplinary to the core,” Watkins went on to train himself in international relations. His 2008 article “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe” has been cited hundreds of times, becoming “a touchstone reference influencing a generation of scholars across a range of disciplines,” according to Oxford Professor of History Tracey A. Sowerby. His most recent book, After Lavinia, traces the influence of Virgil in premodern marriage diplomacy. His work has been supported by major fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Liberal Studies, and American Philosophical Society.

Watkins has also embraced scholarly collaboration, with two co-edited collections and a volume co-authored with University of Nebraska Professor of History Carole Levin, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds. Watkins combines brilliance with kindness, says Levin. “John has so many friends and makes each of us really feel we matter.”

English chairs past and present have valued his “charismatic leadership” (Michael Hancher) and thoughtful advice within the department. “He makes every room he walks into (even Zoom rooms!) a warm and friendly place,” says current Chair Kathryn Nuernberger. 

“I’m sure I’m not the only member of the faculty who has been sustained in good times and bad by his wry insights into institutional and academic life,” says Professor Brian Goldberg. “His commitment to the study of literature and to the life of the mind are endless sources of inspiration.”

Endings and beginnings

Retiring for Watkins doesn’t mean the end of writing and research, though his interests have shifted from early modernism. He is halfway through a book inspired by his “End of the World” class: “I think there's a market for a funny introduction to the apocalypse. There is something absurdist in apocalyptic narratives and in our fascination with them.”

A classical music enthusiast, he is excited about a project on English composer Benjamin Britten, whose work linked music and literature and was shaped by World War II and the emergence of the atomic bomb. Watkins has begun exploring the Britten Pears Archive in Britten’s hometown of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. “It is a very small, focused archive, but they have amazing stuff. And the more time I'm in Suffolk, the happier I am, because truly Suffolk and Venice are my two favorite places on Earth.” He pauses for effect. “And it just so happened that Britten finished his career with an opera based on Death in Venice.”

The Arkansas native also plans to spend more time alone walking Midwestern prairies, which he’s grown to love for “the drama of the sky.” One of his dreams, he says, is to walk across Nebraska. “I feel sadly claustrophobic in forests,” he says wryly. “I like to know what's coming.”

Back in the Zoom classroom, the professor is skillfully pulling together course themes to show how Angels in America rejects the apocalyptic narrative that a broken world will/should return to an original, static perfection. “To embrace life is to accept loss,” Watkins says, and quotes Kushner: “Time only spins forward.” He pauses for a moment. “It’s always hard to say goodbye to students,” he says deliberately. And with this last class, he notes, he’s marking not only the end of the course but the end of a 37-year career of teaching. “But time marches on.”

There’s a beat of silence. Then the students rush to their microphones and keyboards to offer thanks, congratulations, and “my favorite class ever” tributes. It’s sudden, sweet cacophony. 

“Academia can often be lonely, isolating, and competitive, but it can also be a space of friendship, support, laughter, and joy,” says Professor Katherine Scheil. “Thank you, John, for bringing out the best in all of us and making our collective life of the mind so much better.”