UCLA Loses Bid to Woo Scholar From Harvard

An accomplished young scholar of Victorian literature whom UCLA had hoped to lure westward says she has decided to return to Harvard in the fall, where she will be a full tenured professor after just two years of teaching.

The decision makes Leah Price, 32, the youngest person to be awarded tenure in the Harvard English department and the first woman to rise to tenure through the ranks of the department, university officials said.

Price, who is spending the year on a fellowship and book leave at Stanford University, confirmed that she is opting for Harvard but declined to comment further.

A scholar with a reputation for provocative, innovative research, Price was recruited last fall by UCLA, which identified her in a search for a 19th century specialist. English department leaders said they were struck by the quality of her scholarship.

UCLA’s pursuit of Price helped force the hand of Harvard, which quickly offered Price a full professorship with tenure. Officials there said the move was also part of a new effort by Harvard to hang on to more of its most talented junior faculty by offering tenure years ahead of the traditional timetable.

Lawrence Buell, chairman of the Harvard English department, said he is delighted that Price is returning to Harvard, where she earned her undergraduate degree and later taught for two years, after doing graduate work at Yale and research at Cambridge University.

“We are indeed lucky that she has decided to join our senior faculty,” Buell wrote in an e-mail last week. “Young as she is ... she is a world-class scholar and also a remarkable teacher and excellent colleague.”

Price is a specialist in 18th and 19th century British literature, with research and teaching interests ranging from the history of the novel to detective fiction. Her work includes examinations of love and sex in Victorian fiction -- on which she taught a popular course at Harvard -- and the role of abridgements and other shortened literary forms in the rise of the novel.

Thomas Wortham, UCLA’s department chairman, said that although he had hoped to persuade Price to come to the Westwood campus, he did not extend a formal offer of tenure, suspecting that she might choose to return to Harvard anyway.

“We identified a very good person, and Harvard responded ... we’re disappointed but also happy it worked out for her,” Wortham said.

At the same time, he said, the UCLA English department, which has a growing reputation for savvy recruiting, is continuing to attract dynamic young scholars and to hold on to its current stars, despite attempts by other universities to steal them.

In recent months, Wortham said, UCLA has fended off runs by Stanford at two of its top scholars of contemporary literature: N. Katherine Hayles, an expert in the influence of electronic media, and Michael North, who specializes in 20th century American and British literature. It has also landed Jonathan Grossman, a young Victorian expert, and Yogita Goyal, a Brown University-trained scholar whose field is African American and ethnic literature.

Wortham said he is awaiting an answer on an offer just made to Saree Makdisi, now at the University of Chicago, who combines interests in William Blake and other writers of the Romantic period with research on the Middle East and imperialism.