Dear James: Thank you for being such an inspiration to me during my time at UNC. You embodied the scholar’s life, and I will be forever grateful to you for being such an exemplary teacher and thinker. When I remember … Read more

James (Jim) Coleman has been my Greenlaw next-door neighbor and admired colleague for many years and I miss him! It was a rare day that we were too busy to exchange pleasantries or share some personal anecdote. My fondest memories … Read more

Dear Dr. Coleman: I met you as a quiet, probably a little odd, twenty-year-old college senior from Florida A&M University, crazy about D. H. Lawrence. I had come as a participant in the MURAP program—the Minority Undergraduate Research Assistant Program—scared … Read more

For James Coleman on His Retirement: Having James Coleman as a colleague during the last phase of my academic career was such a gift. We met almost fifteen years ago on the stairway in Greenlaw Hall, where of course the … Read more

To Jim Coleman, with Appreciation, on His Retirement:  “He’s written his books; now you write yours.” Professor James Coleman said that to me during my dissertation prospectus meeting as I outlined my plan to write a study of Charles Johnson’s … Read more

For James Coleman on His Retirement: How many times have I passed James’s office on the second floor of Greenlaw on my way to the copying room or somewhere nearby and noted his door open, a student inside and maybe … Read more

For James Coleman on His Retirement: I got to know James Coleman shortly after he joined our faculty in 1990 or 1991 and have valued him not only as a distinguished professor but as a good friend. Among other things, … Read more

For James Coleman on His Retirement: Professor James W. Coleman, PhD from the University of Chicago and teaching at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill since the early 1990s, is the author of at least five books: Blackness and Modernism: … Read more

For James Coleman on His Retirement: When I was department chair, I liked to describe us as a “full-service English department.” James Coleman was one of the colleagues I would have singled out as a prime example of what I … Read more

For James Coleman on his Retirement: Professor James Coleman’s illuminating scholarship, his penetrating attentiveness to the materiality and metaphor of freedom in contemporary African American literature, has made him one of our most thoughtful and influential critics in the field. … Read more