Scholar

SCHOLAR

CALLAGHAN BECAME A SERIOUS academic, entering the graduate program in English at the University of Toronto, in 1961. In that year he was made a teaching fellow. In 1962 he received his M.A. (thesis work: Edgar Allen Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gorden Pym). In 1965 he wrote his general PhD exams receiving a First in all seven areas of examination (thesis work: the American Man of Letters Edmund Wilson; though over the years Callaghan wrote extensively on Wilson, the thesis itself he did not complete). He was made a Lecturer at York University, Atkinson College, in 1965, hired by his mentor in the graduate school, Donald F. Theall. He was made co-chairman of the English Department at Atkinson in 1967. He soon became known as an outstanding teacher. In 1972 (the year that he was fired from the CBC for political reasons), there was an attempt to deny him tenure for reasons generally regarded as political, too. That attempt failed when his dean Harry Crowe intervened directly on his behalf with the President of the university.

Over the years he taught hundreds upon hundreds of students (interestingly, he refused throughout his career to teach in the graduate school, preferring always to teach everything from the mandatory introductory course to his favorite 400-level course, Studies In Post Concentration Camp Literature). He retired in 2006, and currently holds the title Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Scholar.

He has accepted two honorary degrees, one from Guelph University in Ontario, and the other, of special significance, from the State University of New York at Buffalo in recognition not only of his own writing, but his contribution to Canadian and American letters.