Shakespeare Authority Imtiaz Habib Remembered as Intense Scholar, Steadfast Mentor
By David Simpson
When Violet Strawderman encountered her professor on the first day of her British literature class in 2013, the Old Dominion University freshman shrank a little inside.
Before her stood Imtiaz Habib, "a tall, thin man with a stern face, and eyes that peered into my soul," she recalls.
Without introducing himself he recited the strict requirements of his course in a voice that went from low and soft to sudden thunder.
She was terrified.
But by the end of the week she had changed her mind about him. Today she describes him as the brightest of the guiding lights in her life.
The ODU community is mourning the loss of Habib, a revered Shakespeare expert and a professor of early modern English literature and postcolonial theory and literature. He died Aug. 27, 2018, at age 69. Colleagues, protégés, and former students remember an intense scholar fiercely devoted to his charges and to his profession.
Strawderman especially recalls something her professor said in that introductory British literature course: "May your dreams catch fire, and become reality, and not burn out."
Habib lit a fire in Strawderman. She says he later told her: "Violet, you're standing at the edge of the academic pool. You've only just stuck your big toe in the water. You have to JUMP in."
Jump she did. She is now working on her master's degree at ODU and teaching English composition as an adjunct.
To Megan Mize, a newly minted Ph.D. whose progress Habib oversaw, the man's passion "was awesome and intimidating. To my mind, he is what a literature professor should be."
She marvels at his supportiveness: "There was no doubt he was 100 percent on my team at both my M.A. and Ph.D. defenses. He'd try to intervene if he thought a question was 'misguided' (his word, not mine) or that perhaps he hadn't anticipated and prepped me for an inquiry. In both events, another instructor told him to let me speak. Each time, he laughed, then backed down. He knew he was shielding his mentee."
On July 5 of this year "my mentor called me 'doctor' for the first time, with his small smile. When I went to hug him, he acquiesced with his usual sense of 'if you must.' "
In class Habib would focus on three aspects of a literary work: the historical context, the characters and story, and the text itself -- down to rhyme schemes, line breaks, even commas, Strawderman says.
She remembers that his lectures were prone to going over the allotted time. Knowing this, he appointed a student timekeeper for each class meeting.
The poet Tom Yuill remembers Habib's Shakespeare seminar. The professor would do a close reading of a poem or play, then go into a theoretical discussion. "He understood the patterns of psychological persuasion in Shakespeare's language, the artistry of Shakespeare's art," says Yuill, an adjunct instructor at ODU and a longtime friend.
Habib also taught the Bard's "sly civility," Yuill says. "Shakespeare appeared to buttress accepted social or philosophical norms, but deftly subverted those norms, revealing human value where it had been missed, and inhumanity where it had been accepted."
Habib could shift his tone in mid-lecture. Yuill remembers him reading from Shakespeare's narrative poem "Venus and Adonis."
"As he discussed Venus' admonishments to Adonis to forget hunting for a while, Dr. Habib interrupted himself and rapped out, 'She's telling him, "Make love, not war, man!" Why doesn't he get with it?'"
Habib was born in Dhaka, East Pakistan. As a young man in the late 1960s, he left home to join the resistance to Pakistani rule but found himself unable to re-enter the country, says his daughter Reema Habib. He ended up in England, where his older sister was studying at Oxford University. His father, relieved to learn the young man was out of harm's way, persuaded him to try Oxford for a year before joining the resistance. While enrolled there on scholarship in 1971, Habib learned that his homeland had won its independence as Bangladesh.
He committed his energies to the study of English literature, completing bachelor's and master's degrees at New College, Oxford. He later earned a Ph.D. at Indiana University and in 1995 arrived to teach at ODU.
His research concentrated on colonialism and race in the early modern period. He wrote many scholarly essays, as well as such books as "Black Lives in the English Archives 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible" (2008) and "Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period" (2000).
Yuill found Habib's theoretical focus refreshing, an "insightful, pleasurable way to read." His orientation provided "keys to unlock and consider values and biases meandering around in literary texts and cultural assumptions."
Habib's scholarly achievements also included conceiving and organizing "Shakespeare 400 Years After: A Public Event," a weeklong festival held in April 2016 at ODU and throughout Hampton Roads. It featured theater, music, film, dance, poetry readings, pop-up shows, and historical exhibitions, as well as a three-day international scholarly conference called "Shakespeare and Our Times" that explored the Bard's enduring presence in modern culture.
Habib pointed out that Shakespeare was a colleague of leaders in the Virginia Company, which established the first permanent English settlement in North America not far from where Old Dominion University now stands.
Habib lamented all the work he had agreed to take on for the festival, Mize remembers. But at the same time, "I saw the pleasure and excitement he had from this large scholarly endeavor. The event was, naturally, extraordinary and visionary for our program and our larger region.
"He'd emphatically tap his desk: 'The early modern moment was here in Virginia. Right here! We must make this visible.'"
His teaching and mentorship weren't confined to campus. Strawderman and other eager students would meet him at Borjo Coffeehouse, "where he always sat at the back by the fireplace, and he'd talk about life, Shakespeare, his granddaughters (all the sternness gone, replaced instead by softness and smiles), and how much the passion of intellectual pursuit mattered."
Reflecting on that passion, Strawderman said that Habib "pushed his students to our limits, to teach us that we had no limits."
After Habib died Mize took over the teaching of his graduate course Shakespeare: Ethnicity and Gender. That first week she asked her students, "Why did you register for this course in particular?"
By that point, she says, "the students had, I think, decided I was a nice enough person in general that they didn't want to hurt my feelings."
They looked at one another.
"It's OK," she told them. "You can say it."
More than one responded: "Because of Dr. Habib."
