In Memory of Professor Anne Golomb Hoffman: a Collective Fathoming of the “Unceasing Activities” of the Self

The English Department mourns the death of our colleague, Professor Anne Golomb Hoffman, on November 4, 2024. 

Professor Anne Golomb Hoffman at her exhibition, Reconfiguring, at Lincoln Center, November 2023. Photo Credit: Babette Babich

Professor Hoffman joined Fordham University in 1979 after completing her graduate work at Columbia University. During her time at Fordham she worked in deeply collaborative and interdisciplinary ways, whether it was in English, Comp Lit, Jewish Studies, Women’s Studies, or psychoanalysis. She brought an authentic spirit of camaraderie to her work, often partnering with faculty from across the University in the development and teaching of courses. This spirit also imbued her administrative work, which was considerable. 

Professor Hoffman in the classroom.

Her scholarly and creative work was vast, ranging from modernism to Hebrew literature to psychoanalysis to painting, but the particular acuity of her intellect made it cohesive. Her work, for instance, on the archival nature of embodiment, spans centuries and disciplines. In it, she moves gracefully from Johann Caspar Lavater in the eighteenth century to Jean-Martin Charcot and his photographic archive of hysteria at the Salpêtrière to Freud’s twentieth-century reckoning with his mentor. The fact of her intellectual generosity is what allows her to formulate a remarkable idea of embodiment, one in which we can access self-portraiture through “an embodied human subject struggling to bring to mind what he already in some sense knows” (35). Her understanding of Freud’s “archival labors of remembering and forgetting” allows us to see “the human subject as the effect of these unceasing activities of remembering and forgetting” (35). 

It is in the spirit of this form of portraiture that we offer this collection of memories. 

From Elizabeth Stone:

I’d like to share this story about the richness of my friendship with Anne Hoffman, our recently retired colleague who died far too soon.  Anne and I first became friends when we were new-ish faculty, both pregnant at the same time in the 1980s.  Her daughter, Liora, was born during the Fall 1981 semester, whereupon, she handed her maternity clothes over to me, which I wore until my son, Paul, was born during the Spring 1982 semester.

For the next 40 years, we celebrated one another’s birthdays, went to the theater together, chatted during office hours in between students’ appointments, and, when I moved to the West Side, together we took the #1 train up to 215 Street where we caught the bus to Fordham for Bronx meetings, talking all the way. For commencement we carried our gowns with us.

During our many years as members of the English Department, Anne’s academic interests (Jewish Studies, psychoanalysis, food scarcity) and mine (Immigration Lit, autobiography, creative nonfiction) did not naturally overlap, but there were times when what she knew was exactly what I needed to know. 

I’ll give only this example: soon after Trump was elected in 2016, and as he was trying to implement a Muslim ban, I had an inexplicable nightmare about my grandmother, an Italian immigrant who’d come in the early 1900s. In my dream, my grandmother was being led away by two officials, forced to register as an enemy alien, during World War II, despite having two sons, one in the Navy, one in the Army, fighting in Europe. — All this well before I was born but devastating to my grandmother and her children, as I heard more than once via family stories. I knew about intergenerational trauma in immigrants’ lives, but I had never had any reason to think I was subject to it.

Little did I know. 

I generally didn’t share my dreams with Anne, but knowing of her family’s flight from Europe to the US as Hitler came to power, I happened to share this one.

“Oh!” she said. “Nachträglichkeit!”  which translated as “afterwardsness.”  In current thinking about the intergenerational transmission of trauma, an ancestral trauma, she said, could be activated in a descendant if the event that had triggered the ancestral trauma made its way into the descendant’s present.” Further conversation followed of course. It illuminated my own thinking about immigration literature enormously. I have many such moments, and I grieve that there will not be more.

Others also wrote deeply of her camaraderie and support, as well. From Elisabeth Frost:

It’s impossible to come up with a single story or image about Anne because Anne imbues my whole experience of Fordham. She led the committee that hired me, and thirty years later, she remains my model for intellectual openness and generosity. Anne gave the best advice about pretty much everything. But what I will miss most is how deeply she honored her colleagues. When I completed a big project, Anne said simply, “Let’s have a party!” And as she did for countless others, Anne opened wide her doors and created a celebration. 

Vlasta Vranjes also wrote of Anne’s deep care for her colleagues. She says: “I don’t have any anecdotes about Anne's work in English – maybe because I don't think of anecdotes when I think of her. I think of her generous spirit; she was always there for her students and colleagues. To me personally, she was a dream mentor who became a dream friend.”

Her ability to connect, authentically with integrity, extended to her administrative leadership as well. Christopher GoGwilt wrote that “In an age of uncertainty, anxiety, and instability – I’m thinking of the moment just before the merger of the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses – Anne was a voice of calm, an ally, and a mentor in collegiality. I have many memories of administrative interventions she was able to facilitate – both from the distant past (the 1990s) and from what seems like just a moment ago. I also have many fond memories of discussions at Comp Lit events; including conversations still unfinished. She will be missed, but her memory will be cherished.” 

Mary Erler wrote of Anne’s grace at the time of the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill merger, as well:

I came to Fordham in 1980, about the same time that Anne arrived, but because I was teaching at Rose Hill I didn't get to know her until the late 1990s, when I was chair of the English Department and Anne was associate chair for Lincoln Center. 

This was the time of the merger between the two campuses, a period of great tension and high feelings. Anne's deep affection for the smaller community at Lincoln Center was a constant element in these negotiations, and her untiring work in representing that community was an important part in developing the paths toward reconciliation that finally emerged.

I remember her with admiration—and fondly.

Fawzia Mustafa also reflected on this moment:

Let me only describe what I think of as Anne’s most important role, amongst many, crucial contributions she made in her long career at Fordham: Chairing the Humanities Division during Restructuring in the mid-nineties. The mistrust between and asymmetrical relationship of the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses was considerable, active, obstructive and, yes, absurd. Anne recognized this and worked tirelessly to help bridge the chasms. Along with Mary Erler, her counterpart at RH, she put many, many hours into both formal and informal meetings between groups, with individuals (repeatedly), orchestrating encounters between factions and hosting generous social events at her home. It took over a year of exhausting, tireless work for her (and Mary) to successfully barter and stitch together a series of coalitions that resulted in English performing the smoothest, most effective, power-house merger within the larger university. For years to come, English was the example other departments struggled to follow. It was no small feat.

Glenn Hendler wrote of his multifaceted connection to Anne:

Of course, I knew Anne Hoffman as a valued colleague, and appreciated every encounter I had with her in that role. But this testimonial is primarily about working with her when I was department chair.

Anne always had a healthy hesitation about having power, but at the same time was very often willing to step up when needed. She was Lincoln Center Associate Chair for a year when I became chair, and that made her by far the most experienced person in my executive committee. It was extraordinarily valuable to have her experience and expertise in the room. Though I'm sure I made lots of mistakes early in my term as chair, she prevented some of the worst errors I could have made. And though her level of experience gave her the right to lord her expertise over me, in actuality she always steered me in the right direction with gentleness and with grace. I always valued her advice immensely, and to the extent that I avoided creating egregious problems when she was associate chair, she deserves the credit!

I also want to mention something intellectual about Anne. My late mother-in-law was in a psychoanalysis reading group with Anne, and always spoke of her intellect with a mixture of awe and intimidation. To use a clichéed expression, Anne was smart as a whip, and people around her knew it. In addition, I will mention that I got together a few years ago with the mother of a childhood friend of mine named Miri Kubovy. It was the first time in many decades that I'd seen Miri, who was the first model I ever had of a serious literary scholar. Miri Kubovy's scholarship was about Israeli literature, and so the only person she really knew at Fordham was, yes, Anne Hoffman. And again, she spoke very highly of Anne's knowledge and expertise in her field. Though Anne and I often profoundly disagreed about political issues around Israel and Palestine, I think that the fact that I had this connection with a senior scholar in Israeli literature—my first paid job was babysitting Miri's son, after all!—gave my views a degree of weight with Anne that they might not otherwise have had. And I was glad of that. 

Teaching, mentorship, intellectual openness, and care were all intertwined for her. The many testimonials that we collected are evidence of that, and it makes them difficult to parse into mere anecdotes of the many domains of excellence she embodied. Instead, it is her whole person that comes through in the stories through which we remember her. 

A collage by Anne Golomb Hoffman from her exhibition Reconfiguring: Drawing, Painting, Mixed Media at Lincoln Center’s Ildiko Butler Gallery, 2023. Photo Credit: Babette Babich

Mark Caldwell:

While I didn’t know Anne as well as many other department members did, in 2019 and 2020 we worked together extensively to set up a collaboration between Fordham and the College in Prison program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in northern Westchester County—New York State’s only maximum-security prison for women.

Anne had had previous experience working with inmates at the now-closed West Street women’s prison in Manhattan, and I’d taught a course at Bedford in the Spring of 2017 that consisted only of inmates. Our plan was to develop a permanent and more comprehensive connection, by which Fordham faculty could teach courses at the prison in mixed classes of Bedford and Fordham undergrads. While several Fordham English faculty expressed interest in the program, Anne was, in the end and despite a full teaching load, the only person willing to take on the burden of devising a pilot course scheduled for the Spring 2020 term.

This, for months before the course began, demanded an enormous amount of work from Anne, all of which she handled with cheerfulness, tact, and efficiency. Among the tasks: multiple trips to Bedford (a two-hour round trip under optimum traffic conditions) an elaborate application process to the state department of corrections that included a criminal background check, a TB test, pre-approval and sometimes protracted negotiations about the course plan and textbooks, plus several daylong orientation sessions at the facility that included fingerprinting and a mugshot.

Anne’s course, Coming of Age in America, once approved, attracted far more Fordham undergrads than the ten we could admit, which necessitated a further series of applications and interviews, then herding the nine selected students through the same corrections department application (which entailed writing a separate recommendation for each Fordham undergrad), then yet another Bedford orientation gauntlet, and finally working out a class schedule that could reconcile Fordham’s and the Bedford Program’s academic calendars—which differ considerably and thus involved teaching extra separate classes at both Fordham and Bedford in order to meet state requirements.

This, though, was only a preface. Coming of Age in America met for the first time on February 3, 2020, at which point Anne’s burden at least doubled. The course met on Mondays from 6 PM to 9 PM at the prison, but faculty and students had to be onsite by 5 PM. So: after teaching at Lincoln Center on Monday, Anne assembled her Manhattan-based Fordham undergrads to catch a reserved Ram Van at 3 PM, which then fought rush-hour traffic to Rose Hill, picked up the Bronx contingent, and proceeded to Bedford, where everyone had to deposit forbidden items (money, keys, cell phones, backpacks and bags, medicines) in a locker and endure three successive airport-style-but-far-more-rigorous security procedures. Finally, after a 10-minute walk and yet another check-in at the education building, they reached the classroom.

Though Anne had to plan for a three-hour session, there was yet another complication. While the Fordham contingent was in place at 6 sharp, the inmates were sometimes as much as an hour late—they’re not allowed to move through the prison individually and have to assemble in guard-escorted groups, which are often delayed because of security issues. This often meant teaching the Fordham students alone for an unpredictable period, then somehow pulling the class together on the fly when the inmates arrived, without either repeating material or depriving the Bedford students of a full-course experience.

Then came the at least hour-long Ram Van trip back to Rose Hill and finally Lincoln Center, where Anne typically arrived at around 10:30 or 11 PM, still faced with a subway ride home to West End Avenue.

Understandably, the students raved about the course and Anne’s unflappable handling of all its challenges: as one Fordham student put it, “By discussing The Bluest Eye at Bedford, amongst a myriad of classmates, I was no longer just stepping into Claudia’s shoes, or Morrison’s shoes, but we were all trying to try them on together and it was easier to understand which parts fit and which parts did not).” But from the intellectual experience on which most of us are usually evaluated, Anne had to perform as a manager and therapist, seeing her Fordham students through their disorienting and intimidating encounter with a maximum security prison during a term already being disrupted by the advent of COVID, only to end abruptly at midterm, when both Fordham and the Bedford Program closed for the remainder of the semester.

All in all, Anne’s was a memorable, dedicated, and extraordinarily effective performance, beyond anything that’s normally expected of anyone who works in higher education.

Philip Sicker:

Anne’s personal elegance and intellectual vigor were exceeded only by her generosity. I first came to know her during those challenging months that followed the merger of faculties in the mid-1990s. Within the climate of anxiety, Anne was a calming presence, privately forging connections with her new Rose Hill colleagues and publicly choosing her calming words with extraordinary care and precision. As a member of departmental personnel and hiring committees, she was an exemplar of ethical professionalism, balancing rigor with compassion in ways that guided the rest of us. To speak with Anne on nearly any subject was to come away delighted and enriched. Whether she was sharing insights on Benjamin’s Arcades Project or describing her transformative experiences teaching prison inmates, her enthusiasm was infectious. I recall discussing the prospect of retirement with Anne on a spring afternoon a few years ago. She explained that while she would welcome more time for her scholarship and painting, she would miss the excitement of the classroom. I admired her undiminished vigor, so rare after forty years, and realized that, far from burning out, Anne’s pedagogical and creative energies were burning more brightly than ever.

Andrew Albin:

I believe in my second year on faculty, back when Dennis, Shonni, and I were in the joint office in Lowenstein 924, we each had to undergo teaching observations for the first reappointment. If I remember rightly, Anne was appointed as my TRS point-person, and she came to observe one of my classes. I remember being quite nervous: I didn't know Anne terribly well at that point, and her bearing and focus were intimidating, to say the least. When we met afterwards to discuss the observation, I was prepared for a thorough critique -- which is indeed what I got, but in the most encouraging, supportive, exploratory manner imaginable. Anne's thoroughness was remarkable: it was such a gift to be seen so clearly and addressed as a fellow educator, engaged in the serious and difficult business of teaching. I left the conversation more eager to return to the classroom than I'd begun, full of confidence and ideas to try out that we'd landed on together. It was a formative experience of my early years at Fordham.

Jessica Denzer:

In 2011, I was a senior at Fordham FCLC, and took a course titled Hysteria, Sexuality, and the Unconscious. It was an interdisciplinary Literature and History experiment, co-taught by Professor Anne Hoffman and Professor Doron Ben-Atar. Beyond introducing me to Freud, Foucault, psychoanalysis, and the wide-reaching work on the unconscious, this class opened my eyes to the vast intersection of intellectual thought and creative output. It’s safe to say that this course, more than any other I’ve taken, shaped my intellectual trajectory. Now, as a writer and teacher, I see my craft and my pedagogy as deeply rooted and informed by my experiences under the guidance of Professor Hoffman and Professor Ben-Atar. I am profoundly grateful to have learned from Anne Golomb Hoffman’s brilliance, and mourn the loss of future students who will not have the same opportunity. This loss is only quelled by the amazing legacy of work she has left to the world. 

Anne Fernald:

Anne was a person of tremendous intelligence and integrity. She did her homework. She held herself to the highest standard. She was generous and warm and forgiving to all others. Her eyes could bore into you like a laser, her gaze was as sharp as an entomologist's pin and more than once I felt myself pinned and quivering, a tiny gnat powerless to know the right response. When I first arrived at Fordham, before I knew her well, and long before I knew how deeply she loved her children (and, later, grandchildren), and how much she cared about the lives of working parents, she asked me what I had done with Olivia, then 18 months old. I was terrified and shared that she was happily installed in a little storefront daycare in Jersey City. Anne looked skeptical. Now I know that her look was one of deep caring. I think often of that gesture in those early days, both my confusion and her care. She was amazing. 

My office used to be on the ninth floor of Lowenstein and sometimes, with the late Anne Mannion of history, I would stand in the hall and talk with Anne. We were the Anne's and took to signing our emails "an(other) Anne." I have never known and loved so many Anne's as in those first years at Fordham.

More than once, when I was in a real pickle with a difficult colleague, she called me on the phone to see if I was ok, listened intently to my concerns, and helped me think through the best response. 

I had so much fondness and respect for her.

Photo Credit: Babette Babich

She is survived by her husband, Leon Hoffman, M.D.; her children, Miriam Hoffman, M.D. (Steven Kleiner, M.D.) and Liora Hoffman, Ph.D. (Rob Yalen); her brother, David Golomb; her niece, Danielle Golomb, M.D.; her nephew, Jesse Golomb; and her grandchildren Shoshana, Elisheva, and Hillel Hoffman Kleiner and Greta and Max Yalen. The English Department will be hosting a celebration of her life on December 6, 10am to noon, at Lincoln Center (Law Room 7-119). All are welcome.