Norhnberg’s said he was looking forward to teaching a class on twentieth Century poetry as well as on his specialty of British Modernism.

“I hope that I’ll be bringing a passion for literary analysis, and also something more general, a sense of literature and its value both to the individual and to broader society,” Nohrnberg said.

De la Durantaye won’t have to move far to take up his new posts: he is currently a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the Humanities in the Literature and Comparative Literature departments.

He said he was looking forward to his move up in the academic world.

“Both inside and outside the University, people will tend to react to you differently if they know you’re a professor and not a post-doctoral fellow in some purgatorial half-station between student and professor,” de la Durantaye said.

All three of the new assistant professors said they were looking forward to giving their first lectures. Nohrnberg, who received his doctorate from Yale, said that he was particularly anticipating his return to Cambridge.

He reminisced about “the standard espresso at the Café Pamplona, the vibrant cultural atmosphere, the jazz at the Regatta Bar, and the Harvard Bookstore.”

“I live in New Haven now, which has no good bookstores,” Nohrnberg said.

According to Buell, the department is happy to have secured the three new scholars for Harvard.

“It doesn’t always work out so well. We were thinking conservatively that we might get two new colleagues,” Buell said. “Three is wonderful.”

The English Department has already announced the appointment of two senior faculty—Daniel Albright and Assistant Professor of English Leah Price ’91.

The department is also working on the appointment of two more senior faculty members in Medievalism and Americanism.

—Staff writer Ben A. Black can be reached at bblack@fas.harvard.edu.