A. D. Van Nostrand

A. D. Van Nostrand joined the Department of English at Brown in 1951, after the completion of his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at Harvard University. The initials "A" and "D" refer to his given names "Albert" and "Douglass" but among his friends he was known as "Van." In his thirty-one years at Brown, he devoted his teaching and research not only to American literature, but to a broad range of concerns about what "writing" means, not only in novels or poetry but in the lives of people writing their lives at home, at work, and in school. Van Nostrand left Brown to become chair of the Department of English at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1982, where he founded the Writing Research Institute, an initiative that began with his work on the teaching of writing at Brown. As a member of the English Department and as chair of the department from 1973-1978, Van Nostrand promoted innovation, helping to put in place the "semiotics" track, which has now evolved into the Department of Modern Culture and Media Studies, and also laying the ground for what is now the Nonfiction Writing Program in English. During the turbulent years of the Vietnam war, Van Nostrand produced an NEH funded multi-media presentation "Exiles in the House," a documentary on generational conflict and he was a recipient of the Peabody Award for educational television. Van Nostrand was a graduate of Amherst College. In 1957-58, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the economics of book publishing, and from 1961-63, he was a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sao Paol, Brazil. His books include Everyman His Own Poet, Major Book Markets in South America, a research report completed for the U.S. Information Agency, and The Denatured Novel, a study of the influence of the publishing business in the United States on the structure of American novels. His work on composition theory and instruction was published in Functional Writing. At the time of his retirement from Brown in June, 1982, President Howard Swearer wrote "I would like to take this opportunity to express our deep appreciation for all that you have done for Brown during your many years on the Faculty. You have contributed immeasurably in so many ways to the life of the University that it would be impossible to list them."