Alan E. Heimert '49, an authority on American literature in the colonial period, has received tenure and will become an associate professor of English on July 1.

Heimert, a student of the late Perry G.E. Miller, graduated from Harvard in 1949, joined the Faculty as an instructor in 1959, and became an assistant professor in 1961.

He has lectured for two years in English 70, the department's survey of American literature. Heimert has also taught a graduate course on colonial literature and an upper-level Humanities course on 18th century American culture. This spring term, Heimert is on sabbatical.

Heimert is the author, with Reinhold Niebuhr, of A Nation So Conceived-- Reflections on the History of America from Its Early Visions Its Present Power (1962).

He has also written two books to be published later this year: Religion and the American Mind: from the Great Awakening to the Revolution, and an anthology, The Great Awakening. In 1957 he was awarded the Bowdoin prize for his essay, "Melville and the American Tragedy," written under the pseudonym of Anacharsis Clootz.

Heimert is the fifth person to reveive tenure in the English Department this spring. The department earlier announced the appointment of Robert Fitzgerald, poet and translator, as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, and the appointment of Larry D. Benson, Daniel Seltzer, and Walter J. Kaiser '54, as associate professors.