Janel M. Mueller

Obituary for Janel Mueller

Janel Mueller joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1967 at the rank of Assistant Professor and retired in 2005 as William Rainey Harper Distinguished Service Professor Emerita. Over those nearly four decades, she left her mark on the institution in every way imaginable.

In addition to her service on myriad administrative committees, commissions, and panels, she served as chair of the degree-granting Committee on General Studies in the Humanities in the late 1970s, and as chair of the English Department in the 1980s. She served as editor-in-chief of the journal Modern Philology in the 1990s. In 1999 she was named Dean of Humanities, a position she held until 2004. In each of these cases, her work was transformative. In each case, she was the first woman to hold the position in question. (In her first four years on the faculty, she had been the only woman teaching in the English Department.)

She was, paradoxically, aware both of her role as a pioneer and of what she saw as the University’s early commitment to bringing women into higher education. In her 1994 “Aims of Education Address” for entering first-years in the College, she posed the question: Why were women so drawn to Harper’s University of Chicago? And her answer on that occasion was a fact that she often repeated with institutional pride: “It was the only ranking university in the United States that both admitted women at all levels and defined itself according to the research model by which leading educators were responding to the revolutionary growth of science in the nineteenth century.”

Janel Mueller’s teaching was rigorous and inspirational at all levels. Her successes in undergraduate pedagogy were recognized with a Quantrell Award in 1982. On the graduate level, she trained generations of young scholars in and beyond early modern studies who are now, in their turn, leaders in their fields. She was duly honored with the University’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring in 1998. In 2000, Modern Philology published a festschrift in her honor; a diverse array of essays by her students testified to the sheer scope of her pedagogical influence. In her passion for teaching, a generous imagination always kept up with an exacting editorial eye.

Janel Mueller’s own research program centered on advancing our knowledge of sixteenth-century English vernacular and translation, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry (especially John Donne and John Milton), and a bracing range of intellectual texts and topics from the English Reformation. From the beginning of her career, she understood the urgency of scholarly editing as a sine qua non of the larger humanities project, and so she not only engaged in monograph writing but also produced a simply formidable list of scholarly editions. Of special note among these, she co-edited four volumes of letters, prayers, speeches, and translations of Elizabeth I (with the University of Chicago Press). Gathering and editing these archival materials required extraordinary feats of research, travel, and transcription, and this intervention firmly established the grounds for understanding Elizabeth Tudor as an intellectual in her own right. Two of these volumes, published with her colleague and co-editor Joshua Scodel in 2009, were awarded the Modern Language Association’s biennial prize for a distinguished scholarly edition. Also of note, her last publication (ten years after her retirement) was nothing less than John Donne: Selected Writings (2015), commissioned for the 21st Century Oxford Authors series at Oxford University Press. Editorial contributions like these assure her a scholarly legacy of extraordinary durability.

Janel Mueller loved the University of Chicago. She was the first woman to serve as dean – of any division. In her role as Dean of Humanities, she was able to bring a lifelong reservoir of academic experience to university leadership, and she relished the opportunity to sustain and improve all she held dear about the institution. She even extended its footprint, with development and opening of Chicago’s Paris Center (where a room now bears her name) in 2003. In 2014, the Division in turn celebrated her signal contributions to the vigor of the Humanities and her shaping influence as a mentor by establishing the Janel M. Mueller Award for Excellence in Pedagogy.