Margaret E. Ward

Margaret E. Ward is Professor of German. She joined the Wellesley College faculty in 1971 and completed her Ph.D. at Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1973 in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She is a 1965 graduate of Wilson College (magna cum laude; Phi Beta Kappa) with majors in German and history. In addition to German language and literature, her graduate work included comparative literature and Western European Studies. For two years (1967-1969) she held DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and Western European Studies fellowships that enabled her to study in Berlin and Paris. Her doctoral thesis was on the interaction of intent, content and form in the plays of two German dramatists, Rolf Hochhuth and Peter Weiss, and a French dramatist, Armand Gatti. At I.U. she was also the recipient of the university-wide Lieber Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Now on an early-retirement pattern of half-time teaching, Professor Ward regularly teaches all the courses in the German language sequence from the first to the fifth semester. In January 2006 she taught an intensive third-semester Intermediate German course (Wintersession-in-Vienna) for the third time. Over the years she has developed and offered a wide range of upper-level courses in German literature, culture and film. Some of her favorites have been: "Berlin in the Twenties," “Post-war German Culture," The Woman Question 1750-1900," "Romanticism," and "Constructing the Other in German Cinema." She has given senior seminars on Bertolt Brecht and Christa Wolf, and she will introduce a new seminar topic in Fall 2006, “Latin America and the Carribbean in the German Imagination,” that is proving to be a rich vein for future of research projects. She has taught several different courses in the “Writing Across the Curriculum” program using the city of Berlin as a focal point. Professor Ward has also directed many undergraduate honors theses and independent study projects, most recently one on nineteenth-century historical ballads.

Professor Ward’s areas of special interest include 19th- and 20th-century German literature, and women's biography. Her research has centered on post-Brechtian political theater, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers. Ward's book, Rolf Hochhuth (Boston: Twayne, 1977) provides an introduction to a key political dramatist of the 60s and 70s. Her book Fanny Lewald: Rebellion and Renunciation has recently been published in the series “Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature,” vol. 85 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). A number of Professor Ward’s students were involved in various stages of the research and writing for this major project on a nineteenth-century novelist and early advocate of women’s education, including archival work on Lewald’s unpublished letters and diaries.

Professor Ward’s articles on Bertolt Brecht, Volker Braun, Ingeborg Drewitz, and Fanny Lewald, among others, have appeared in such scholarly journals as Brecht Jahrbuch, The Women in German Yearbook, Studies in GDR Culture and Society, and The University of Dayton Review. She has been a regular contributor to the annual German publication, Berühmte Frauenkalender, most recently with a bio-bibliographical sketch on Geraldine Ferraro. Her essays have appeared as chapters in books: Women Writers in German-Speaking Countries (Greenwood), Thalia's Daughters: German Women Dramatists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Francke), and Politics in Literature (Camden). For her research, Professor Ward has been the recipient of several Andrew W. Mellon travel grants, and both National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright fellowships.

Professor Ward has chaired her department five times during her thirty-five-years at Wellesley and directed the Wellesley-in-Vienna study abroad program twice. She has also served on a wide range of committees at the College including the Board of Admission and Advisory Committee on Budgetary Affairs, both of which she chaired for two consecutive years. She has also served on Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty Appointments, Faculty Merit, Financial Aid, President’s Advisory Council, and various ad hoc committees, search committees, and advisory boards. She has served as an outside member of the Reappointments and Promotions committees of the Russian Department and the Women’s Studies Department. As part of a college-wide curricular review in the 1990s she co-chaired the Task Force on Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching. Currently she serves on the International Study and Fulbright Fellowship committees.

Professor Ward was one of the faculty members who helped bring Women's Studies as an academic program to Wellesley College in the late 1980s, and she has served on its Advisory Board, as well as on the Board of Overseers of the Center for Research on Women.

She has repeatedly shown her special concern for student life and the overall quality of community life by service on the Trustees Student Life Committee, by being a faculty mentor to new faculty, and by regular participation in programs for first-year students. Her special concern for students as both a teacher and mentor was recognized when she was named to the rotating William R. Kenan, Jr. professorship from 1995-97.

In 1994 Professor Ward organized a workshop at Wellesley on Interdisciplinary German Studies for twelve New England colleges and universities. From 1995-1997 she served on the national steering committee of the Coalition of Women in German, an allied organization of the Modern Language Association of America. She is a member of Women in German, the German Studies Association and the American Association of Teachers of German, as well as a Boston-based WIG study group. She is also a member of Delta Phi Alpha, the German Honorary Society, and has been an officer in the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Professor Ward is married to Dr. Thomas E. J. de Witt, President of Lasell College in Newton (Auburndale). The couple met when Dr. de Witt taught German history at Wellesley in 1973-74. They have two sons, Nelson and Derek. She is currently writing a book about her older son’s adoption, set against the backdrop of the Salvadoran Civil War. She spent part of her sabbatical in Central America in Spring 2005, in order to interview members of his biological family and do research in newspaper archives.

Prof. Ward has been an active member of the Lake Skatutakee Association of Harrisville, NH, an association of lake residents and property owners concerned with water quality, dam safety, and other environmental protection issues. She has previously been president, vice-president, and newsletter editor, but serves now as the associations’ archivist and historian and as head of their “Weed Watch.” She and her husband are Overseers of Historic Harrisville, Inc. and long-time members of the First Baptist Church in Newton.

Profile last updated: 5/06