Catching up with Eleanor Courtemanche
Eleanor Courtemanche lives far from Huntington, but she will always be connected in a special way to the town and the high school where she was valedictorian of the Class of 1986. Today she’s an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of a book on 19th century capitalism that will be published soon.
Following that warm June afternoon when she gave a stirring valedictory address to her classmates and their family members, Ms. Courtemanche headed off to Yale University, “where I had a fantastic time,” she said. “I majored in literature, which at Yale was known for its philosophical intensity, so I took a lot of courses in philosophy and aesthetic theory.”
“I felt well-prepared for my Yale classes by all the AP courses I’d taken at Huntington High School, especially the ones in English and history,” Ms. Courtemanche said. “Since I’d been a managing editor of The Dispatch, I decided to write for the Yale Daily News and became one of the editors of the weekly arts supplement. During my four years at Yale I supported myself by working in the Calhoun College Dining Hall scooping out desserts, and later picked up another job as a gofer and research assistant for the Lit department.”
The first of seven Courtemanche siblings to graduate from Huntington High School, the 1986 valedictorian wrote her Yale senior essay on Hegel and Walter Benjamin, and graduated summa cum laude. “I was also pleased to be voted ‘Most Likely to Deconstruct’ by the other seniors in my dorm,” she said.
The last of the Courtemanche children to earn a Huntington diploma was David, who graduated in 1999. “David and my sister Margaret now both own houses in Huntington, where they live with their families,” Eleanor Courtemanche said.
After graduating from Yale, Ms. Courtemanche went on the road. “My great plan was to win a scholarship for study abroad—preferably a Rhodes!—but I ended up with nothing,” she said. “I still wanted to travel, though, so I decided to try to support myself abroad with a series of work visas. About a month after graduation, I bought a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv and didn’t come back to the U.S. for another 14 months. First, I traveled around Israel with three girlfriends, and then my friend Cathy and I went to Paris for three months, where I found work as a bilingual secretary in a prestigious law firm right behind the American Embassy. I guess all those years studying French with Mme. Gilbert paid off! We didn’t have much money, so we ate a lot of couscous and sardines from the discount market.”
In the fall of 1990, Ms. Courtemanche and her friend moved to London, “where we found a chilly flat above a laundromat east of the city, and I tried to support myself as a temp worker,” she said. “But the economy had just gone into recession. I developed an interest in economic theory when I realized my job prospects depended on German interest rates. However, I managed to save enough money to take a German class in Berlin the next spring, and then I traveled around Europe, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, from Amsterdam to Istanbul. The Berlin Wall had only fallen a year or so before, so American students were flooding into Eastern Europe to take advantage of the amazing exchange rates. I was especially delighted with Prague, and later studied Czech for several years.”
At Huntington High School, Ms. Courtemanche was nothing short of magnificent. She won a National Merit Scholarship, Regents Scholarship and Presidential Academic Fitness Award. At the senior awards assembly on June 13, 1986, she was presented with the Sandy and Harry Chapin Scholarship, General Organization Award, Emma Downs Carter Prize, Phi Betta Kappa Certificate, Sons of American Revolution History Award and a Math Fair Award.
“In the fall of 1992, I started a graduate program in comparative literature at Cornell, hoping to pursue my interest in French and German literature,” Ms. Courtemanche said. “Ithaca is a great place to be a starving grad student: lots of organic groceries and dusty import shops. I went back to Berlin on a fellowship in the spring of 1995, and took classes at the Freie Universität. I also met and then (in 1996) married fellow grad student Ted Underwood, who was studying Romantic poetry in the English department. In 1998 I got my PhD from Cornell, with a dissertation tracing Adam Smith’s idea of the ‘invisible hand’ through Victorian British and German novels.”
It didn’t take long for the newlyweds to discover “the academic job market is very complicated,” she said. “You can’t just move to a city and then hope to find a job; you have to go where the jobs are, which could be anywhere in the country. Ted got a fine job at Colby College in Maine, but the German department didn’t need me and there weren’t a lot of other jobs in central Maine. So I was married but unemployed—precisely the opposite of how I’d thought I’d end up at 30! Then I got a postdoctoral fellowship teaching cultural studies—a field that hadn’t even existed when I started grad school—at Macalester College in St. Paul.”
What followed were several years where the couple hunted for jobs in the same city, while continuing to commute back and forth to see each other. “A lot of our other academic friends were in the same position of trying to get teaching jobs for both partners: they call it the ‘two-body problem,’” Ms. Courtemanche said. “I was able to pick up short-term jobs teaching English, until eventually I taught Victorian literature full-time. After a year teaching in Los Angeles at Claremont McKenna College, I returned to Minnesota for a position at Carleton College in the small town of Northfield.”
Ms. Courtemanche and her husband finally struck pay dirt in 2003, landing positions in the English department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The University of Illinois is a big, thriving research institution with a smart and diverse student body and a lot of interdisciplinary initiatives,” she said.
It was 22 years ago when then Huntington High School Principal James Salvatore introduced Ms. Courtemanche for her valedictory address at the 125th annual commencement on Sun. June 29, 1986 at 1:30 p.m. As she walked off the stage that day, diploma in hand, no one, including her, could have predicted the road ahead and all the stops along the way. But, neither could anyone have doubted, success would surely follow this gifted grad.
“As an assistant professor, I teach classes here on Victorian literature and economic theory,” she said about her work on the Univ. of Illinois campus. “Ted just published a book on British Romantic poetry and fantasies of solar power and my own book on 19th-century capitalism and the novel will be published soon. We bought an affordable house with a big garden, and so far we’re very happy. But though we like living in Champaign, I miss Huntington’s pretty rolling hills!”
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