After Nearly Four Decades at Duke Professor Joseph A. Porter Retires

(Update) On December 14, 2019, Joe Ashby Porter passed away. Joseph Ashby Porter's Duke obituary

After being a part of the English Department faculty for nearly 40 years, Professor Joseph A. Porter, aka Joe Ashby Porter, has retired.  Prof. Porter joined the faculty at Duke in 1980 after teaching full-time at the University of Virginia and part-time at three other institutions.  During his tenure at Duke, Professor Porter taught in the English and Theater Studies departments.

Prof. Porter received his BA from Harvard, was a Fulbright Fellow at Pembroke College Oxford, earned his MA and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.  Porter has lived in France, England, and North Africa.  He speaks French and acknowledges that French literature has influenced his literary work.  

Porter served as the principal investigator for the American Academy of Poets Award which is awarded by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.  He has served as a Visiting Professor at the Université François Rabelais in Tours in France, and as a Writer in Residence at Brown University.  He has twice served as an instructor at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. 

Over the years Professor Porter has authored ten books and edited or co-edited nine others.  Much of his scholarly work has focused on William Shakespeare, including The Drama of Speech Acts and Shakespeare's Mercutio.  Porter has edited Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and co-edited eight volumes of Renaissance Papers.  

Porter has published several novels and fiction collections under his pseudonym Joe Ashby Porter including Eelgrass, Resident Aliens, and The Near Future and The Kentucky Stories, Lithuania: Short Stories, Touch Wood: Short Stories, and All Aboard Stories.  Joe Ashby Porter received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for The Kentucky Stories and one for Touch Wood.  Porter won an Academy Award in Literature in 2004 from the American Academy of Arts and Literature.   During the presentation of this honor, the Academy stated, "No writer of his gifted generation has shown greater daring or has earned higher praise."

English Professor Melissa Malouf shared a brief story about meeting Porter and her time as his colleague, "I met Joe Porter in 1984. At that time, I had finished a Ph.D. at U.C. Irvine but had published only a couple of stories in literary magazines. Joe was happy to read them as I poured through his Kentucky Stories. And we have been reading each other ever since. And sharing food and spirits from Durham to Key West."

"Porter is THE authority on Shakespeare.  Professor Porter's lectures go beyond discussing the plays and get into what Shakespeare was thinking, and the importance of every word.  Porter has dedicated his life to his work, and a student who didn't take him would miss out on one of the most brilliant minds at Duke." was posted on ratemyprofessors.com by one of Professor Porter's English 337 students in 2017.

"A few years ago I taught a class I called 'ultra fiction,' in which the students and I tried to give the term meaning by teasing out affinities among a group of twentieth-century works that had long seemed to be akin, and kin to my fiction. We agreed that, unlike conventional fiction in which the page serves as a transparent window giving onto the story, and unlike kinds of metafiction in which the page tends toward presentational opacity, ultra fiction shelters itself with neither ploy. Ultra fiction instead offers a steadily expanded cognizance of the story as imagined and told. While I most obviously push in these directions in some recent short stories, I believe even my more ostensibly everyday work, such as my novel Resident Aliens, also has an untraditional dimension." - A quote from Professor Porter on Encyclopedia.com

English Department Chair Robert Mitchell took a few moments to comment on Professor Joseph Porter's value to the field of English, Duke University, and especially the Duke English Department: "In my time at Duke, Professor Porter has been a tireless advocate for both scholarly research on Shakespeare and creative writing at Duke. Since Duke founding, creative writing has played a key role in the identity of the Duke English Department. And since 1980, Professor Porter has been central to our creative writing program, both through his novels and awards and by helping to nurture and train multiple generations of wonderful writers."

The English Department would like to thank Joe Porter for his decades of service to Duke University, especially the English Department. Porter's investment into the lives of your students, research, literary works have produced a return on investment that cannot be measured.  We will never be able to thank Professor Joseph A. Porter enough for all his work and contributions.