The School of Arts and Humanities would like to honor and thank three long-time faculty members who are retiring. Milton Cohen retired May 31 and Fred Turner and Zsuzsanna Ozsváth will retire Aug. 31.
Fred Turner
Dr. Fred Turner is a poet, a cultural critic, a playwright, a philosopher of science, an interdisciplinary scholar, an aesthetician, an essayist and a translator. He is the author of 28 books, including Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science; Genesis: an Epic Poem; and Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion and Education. His plays Height and The Prayers of Dallas have been performed in various locations. He is a winner of the Milan Fust Prize (Hungary’s highest literary honor), the Levinson Poetry Prize (awarded by Poetry), the PEN Dallas Chapter Golden Pen Award, the Missouri Review essay prize, the David Robert Poetry prize, the Gjenima Prize, and several other literary, artistic and academic honors. He has participated in literary and TV projects that have won a Benjamin Franklin Book Award and an Emmy, respectively. He is a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 and every year following 2006.
Milton Cohen
Dr. Milton Cohen came to UT Dallas in 1980 as an assistant professor of English and education. He rose through the ranks and In 2005 was appointed professor of literary studies. Cohen specialized in 20th century American literature and modernism. Recently, he studied the influence of 1930s leftism on American writers in Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s. His first book, “Poet and Painter: The Aesthetics of E.E. Cummings’s Early Work,” examined the visual career of the poet E.E. Cummings. In 1982, the research on which the book was based was highlighted in an exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. In addition to his scholarly books on E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and modernist groups, Cohen has written three historical plays.
Zsuzsanna Ozsváth
Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth was the founder and first director of the UT Dallas Holocaust studies program. She has published a number of articles, dealing with aesthetic and ethical issues in French, German, and Hungarian literature as well as with the relationship between art and totalitarian ideology. Since the 1980’s, she has undertaken several translation projects and worked on various branches of Holocaust studies. In the field of translation, she started out with rendering and publishing a significant number of German and Hungarian poems and short stories in journals, but the culmination of her work in this field has been three volumes of poetry, each with Dr. Fred Turner. Ozsváth has also published books and several articles on writers and poets of the Holocaust. In 2010, Ozsváth published her chilling memoir, When the Danube Ran Red, which tells the story of her childhood in Hungary, living under the threat of the Holocaust.