Jim Daniels taught and developed poetry, fiction and screenwriting throughout his 40 years in the Department of English. His poems have been displayed on the roof a racecar and sent to the moon as part of the MoonArk Project. He founded CMU’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Writing Awards in 1999 and directed the competition for Pittsburgh-area high school and college students through 2020. He received numerous awards from CMU, including the Ryan Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Mark Gelfand Service Award for Educational Outreach, the Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Teaching and Educational Service, and a Faculty Service Award from the Carnegie Mellon Alumni Association.

Daniels’ recent books include “The Middle Ages,” “Street Calligraphy,” “Rowing Inland,” “The Perp Walk” and “Eight Mile High.” He has written four produced screenplays, including, most recently, “The End of Blessings.” In addition, he has collaborated with the photographer Charlee Brodsky on numerous gallery shows and publication projects, including their book, “Street,” which won the Tillie Olsen Prize. Daniels has received the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

David Kaufer is retiring after 40 years with the Department of English, including 15 years of service as department head. He has published four books, four textbooks and over 100 refereed articles on text analysis, rhetorical analysis, writing theory, and writing and technology.

Kaufer’s research focuses on digital approaches to text analysis and collaboration. He has built large-scale digital dictionaries (the DocuScope default Libraries) to analyze and assess writing that have been used by the ETS, RAND, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Stanford Literary Lab. Researchers from the English Department and the Computer Visualization Lab of the University of Wisconsin received a Mellon grant specifically to make it possible for textual researchers worldwide to run his dictionaries in their various research projects. With Ananda Gunawardena of Princeton University’s Computer Science Department, Kaufer also co-invented Classroom Salon, a web-based application used to support textual annotation and collaboration in the humanities and STEM fields. That project currently has 20,000 users and has received support from the Heinz Endowments, National Science Foundation, the Gates Foundation and Google. In addition to being a descriptive expert in the rhetorical patterns of English writing, Kaufer is an expert in the normative principles underlying effective written communication and has written three textbooks on the subject.

In his retirement, Kaufer looks forward to more time to write, lecture abroad and let ideas incubate. He intends on staying close with the Department of English’s writing programs.

Kristina Straub was a Department of English faculty member for 33 years, studying, teaching and writing about feminist cultural studies, sexuality studies, performance studies and 18th-century British cultural studies. She is the author of three books — “Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism and Violence Between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” “Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology,” and “Divided Fictions: Fanney Burney and Feminine Strategy” — and dozens of articles. In 2016, Straub co-curated the exhibit “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity” at the Folger Shakespeare Library with University of Texas at Austin’s Janine Barchas. Most recently, she investigated the confluence of a growing commercial culture of public knowledge, in which the theater and periodical press play key roles, with the decline of English universities from 1660 to 1770. 

A recipient of Dietrich College’s 2021 Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Distinguished Teaching and Educational Service, she has appreciated how interactions with her students have kept her intellectually alert, honest and attuned to the importance of making “academic” issues matter to how we think about and live our lives. This year, she also received the American Society for 18th Century Studies Graduate Student Caucus Excellence in Mentorship Award.

In retirement as in her career, Straub looks forward to collaboration with other scholars and artists. She is part of the R/18 Collective, an international group of scholars dedicated to bringing 18th-century drama to the 21st-century stage. In addition, she is writing a book on the development of public knowledge in 18th-century Britain through a variety of popular entertainment forms, including musical theater, oratory and the commercial display of technological innovations. Straub is looking forward to relaxed time with family and friends, and she is eager to return to an early and on-going passion for drawing.

Jan Puhl is retiring after 42 years of service to CMU. Most recently, she worked with the Department of Philosophy’s graduate students, supporting them from the application process through graduation and beyond. In addition to playing a major role in planning the department’s commencement ceremonies, Puhl kept in touch with alumni, gathering information on their successes and helping them to obtain letters of recommendation. Her colleagues remember her for her dedication to CMU, precise record-keeping and many moments filled with laughter. 

Puhl plans to spend much of her time in retirement enjoying nature, biking, hiking and walking her two flat-coated retrievers with her family. She also looks forward to traveling and spending time with her extended family.

Michael Scheier is retiring after 46 years in the Department of Psychology, which included more than 10 years as department head. His research builds on his interest in human motivation and examines problems in effective self-management. Scheier seeks to understand what happens when people encounter difficulties in their lives trying to attain the things they want — or avoid the things they don't want. He has examined the role that dispositional optimism, purpose in life and adjustment abilities play in dealing with stressful life circumstances. In other recent research, he has explored individual differences in goal disengagement and goal re-engagement processes and has tried to understand how such differences impact adjustment to chronic diseases that become progressively worse over time. He has co-authored two research monographs and a textbook on personality, as well as more than 200 chapters and empirical papers.

Scheier is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), which presented him and his long-time collaborator, Charles S. Carver, with its Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 2018. He previously served as president of the APA’s Health Psychology Division and received the association’s awards for Outstanding Contributions to Health Psychology and the Donald T. Campbell Award for distinguished lifetime contributions to social psychology. Scheier also is a fellow of the Society of Behavioral Medicine and a member of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research.

In retirement, Scheier is planning to travel with his wife around the world (as the pandemic allows) and spend more time on the water fly fishing. He’s also looking forward to not feeling guilty about turning down journal editors who request reviews.