The department then recommended Stauffer for tenure in February, and after the ad hoc committee reviewing his work met with University President Lawrence H. Summers in March, Summers approved the offer.

Stauffer, who also considered a job offer from Amherst, said that while he was drawn to the school’s small community and large degree of professor-student interaction, Harvard’s English department is more interdisciplinary, allowing him to combine interests in literature and history.

“Harvard’s English department is a very diverse place, which I very much like,” Stauffer said. “Everyone is grounded and trained in English and literary studies, but there is also some great historical work being done.”

Stauffer is currently working on a book called By the Love of Comrades: Interracial Friendships, Democratic Dreams and the Meaning of America, which uses the Aristotelian idea of friendship as a “test case for a virtuous society,” he said.

“All three groups, in black, in Native American and in white traditions, define equality as one of the many meanings of friendship,” Stauffer said.

He said he found that true equality among interracial friends depends on the sharing of political ideals.

“When blacks and whites have the same political commitment, their friendships and their interactions are at equality,” Stauffer said.

In researching the book, Stauffer examined the course of American history, finding that “the Civil War-era and World War II are two moments in which interracial friendships and visions of interracial equality begin to proliferate,” he said.

He studied America’s literature as well, finding that “a lot of the classic literature on interracial friendship, Melville, Cooper, Twain, all of them, in creating their classic stories, were self-conscious of using friendship as a way to explore American political ideals.”

In both American history and literature, interracial friendships seem to “occur in some sort of a frontier space, whether in the wilderness, a whaling ship or a river raft in the nineteenth century”—an area outside of mainstream society that allows people to “live subversively,” Stauffer said.

Stauffer has taught English 176a, “American Protest Literature,” which Buell described as one of the most popular courses in the department, English 172, “19th-Century American Novel,” and English 90kw, “The American Civil War.”

He plans next year to teach courses on Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, and on ethnic American autobiography.

Students praised Stauffer for his wide expertise on American history and literature.

“What is incredibly impressive about him is that he has this endless reserve of knowledge,” said Margot E. Kaminski ’04, who took Stauffer’s seminar on American historical fiction and a sophomore History and Literature tutorial he co-taught. “He’s been able to recommend a minimum of 10 books for whatever topic I come to him about.”

Kaminski said she is still grateful that Stauffer let her into his seminar, which had mostly graduate students, when she was a first-year.

Buell describes Stauffer, who supervises student work in English, History and Literature and a graduate program on American Civilizations, as “one of the best mentors of individual student projects.”

He also cited Stauffer’s “skill and commitment in working with undergraduate honors projects, trying to enable the students that he’s working with to do the very best that they can do.”

—Staff writer Tina Wang can be reached at tinawang@fas.harvard.edu.