It sounds like the ideal life: dedicating the working hours to your passion, knowing the one whom you love and live with shares your interests and dedicates his or her life to similar endeavors.
The dreamy vision translates into reality for many married professors at the University.
Karen Chase, English professor and wife of English professor Michael Levenson, said the hard work of writing books with and team-teaching with her husband would hardly dim the romantic notions of academia many students have.
"We really love working together," Chase said.
She concentrates on the nineteenth century, and he focuses on modern literature and culture.
"Our cooperative work allows us to dispense with the boundaries that exist between work and home. Our conversation at dinner runs from Joyce to our children, and I find it entirely wonderful," she added.
Chase said that marriage with someone who understands and complements her academic infatuations has never made her seriously question her own academic competence.
"The idea of competition has always seemed so alien to me," she said. "The only real drawback concerns another thing entirely, that neither of us can change a light bulb. The practical sides of life."
Chase described how tasks that others consider perfunctory chores, such as pumping gas, can become arduous or dangerous work for her and Levenson.
"Since we have a tendency to elaborate all the time, simple jobs can take forever," she added. "We don't realize how weird we can seem because we're both the same way."
While other married professors also enjoy the obvious perks of intelligent conversation and the pleasure of each other's achievement, few work as often together in their professional lives as do Chase and Levenson.
The duo co-authored "The Spectacle of Intimacy: a Public Life for the Victorian Family," and team-taught ENNC 950, a graduate seminar on Charles Dickens, as well as ENAM 481, an undergraduate seminar on the Broadway musical.
"As far as team teaching goes, we do like to think that people can look at us and see that it is possible to have an intellectual life and a romantic life. Why hide it? Why not celebrate it?" she said.
Like many couples, their children's interests closely resemble theirs: their son, Alex, enjoys history, their daughter, Sarah, is a literature lover.
Chase said she and Levenson read their favorite Charles Dickens novels to them before they were five years old.
"It's hard not to impose your own enthusiasms," Chase said.
Professor romances also cross departmental boundaries, as Music Dept. Chairwoman Judith Shatin and Cognitive Psychology Prof. Michael Kubovy demonstrate.
Kubovy met Shatin in 1990 when he visited the music department to gather materials for his work on rhythm.
"Many people don't realize that rhythm is studied in different fields, and it is a subject a psychology professor and a music professor can both study," Shatin explained.
After that initial meeting, Shatin said she began attending his lectures.
They were married two years later.
The couple, who has taught a music class entitled Psychology of Music, discovered that their interdisciplinary interests blend rather nicely.
"If I'm coaching a premier of one of my pieces, he's interested to hear it, and I love hearing his lectures," Shatin said. "Our work and our passions intertwine."
It is fortunate that they do, Shatin said, because she can hardly think of a time when they are not working.
"We enjoy working here, but most students don't realize how demanding professors' schedules are. We don't go home and kick back; we go home and work really hard," she said.
Assoc. Prof. Vanessa Ochs, director of Jewish Studies and wife of Peter Ochs, professor of modern Judaic Studies, agrees with Shatin.
"It's not a glamorous life," Vanessa Ochs said. "Peter is in his office typing, and I'm in my office typing."
Before coming to the University to teach, Vanessa completed her doctoral program at the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York, while her husband taught at Drew University. When the University offered Peter a chair position in modern Jewish thought, Vanessa received a position as well.
She had to finish her work, however, and Peter moved to Charlottesville alone in 1997. After he commuted for a year between New York and Virginia, the Ochs decided they wanted to be together again, and she came to Grounds in the fall of 1998.
The Ochs' arrival in Charlottesville followed the University's practice of hiring spouses. The University considers hiring an "accompanying spouse" when they entice their main professor interest, called the "primary spouse," College Assoc. Dean Karen Ryan said.
If a dean is interested in hiring someone for a certain department, and then discovers that individual's spouse could fit into a different department, the primary spouse's department would pay for his salary, while the Office of the Provost would provide a salary for the accompanying spouse.
The primary spouse is hired for four years, and the accompanying spouse for three. Then, at the end of three years, it becomes the duty of the second department to pay the salary of the accompanying spouse.
"Unfortunately, a department is rarely able to find a perfect fit to absorb the accompanying spouse," Ryan said. "The single most difficult thing about hiring and retention is finding a position that is rewarding and fulfilling for that accompanying spouse."
That difficulty in absorbing professors explains why smaller departments, such as music, have fewer married couples than a large department, such as English, which can afford to maintain a variety of faculty positions.
Jointly hiring an academic couple is a move the University actively tries to do.
It is to the University's advantage to hire couples, Ryan said, because couples tend to stay at an institution longer than single professors do.
"They're happy and stable and work well. We don't have to worry about them being lured away to somewhere else," she added.
Vanessa Ochs said she considers herself and her husband happy and stable. The religious studies couple doesn't share classes or write books together as do Chase and Levenson, but they do share students.
"When students call at home for Professor Ochs, we don't know which one of us they want," she joked. "We get to share the pleasure of watching our students develop."
Because the religious studies department is large, like the English department, Vanessa said she found it easy to carve out her own space, both within her field and her department.
"A professor's world takes place on a national and international scale, as well as locally at conferences and meetings. I'm with other scholars of women and Judaism, and anthropology and Judaism, and Peter is with other theologians," Vanessa Ochs said. "We have quite distinct worlds, with different relationships."
Vanessa Ochs said she and Peter always struggle with the long hours and demanding work, but never doubt they have found their calling.
"It's almost a monastic discipline. You're intensely focused, all the time, but you wouldn't want it any other way," she said.
The Ochs have two daughters: Elizabeth, 18, who is interested in studying Jewish studies and race relations when she goes to college next year, and Juliana, 22, who recently received an M.A. in anthropology.
"While I grew up in a family where my parents were pretty clueless about my intellectual interests, my own children are not seen as freakish for having them," Vanessa Ochs said.
Raising kids, writing books and teaching courses cannot guarantee that professor couples will live an arcadian existence of marital bliss, but some couples said they enjoy the occasional breaks from their brainy work - without leaving their intellects behind.
Chase and Levenson love Stephen Sondheim musicals, while Vanessa and Peter Ochs in contrast, find succor from stress in their backyard.
"When our brains fizzle, we'll find each other planting in the garden," Vanessa Ochs said.
Others, such as English professors Jahan Ramazani and his wife Caroline Rody, turn to a mutual love of jazz and their children for relief from work.
Ramazani, who joined the faculty in 1988, also is no stranger to long commutes to see a spouse at another university.
Rody, an assistant professor, taught at Yale before coming to the University in 1996, and Ramazani said he was grateful for the move.
Although they both spend their days on the same floor of Bryan Hall, Ramazani says their different concentrations - he in poetry and postcolonial literature and she in women's and ethnic fiction - make their working lives seem worlds apart.
"Poetry and prose are each huge universes in themselves," Ramazani said. "It's nice that we have convergent yet distinct interests."
Because they have different concentrations, the key bond in their work stems from sharing the same career pressures and cerebral passions.
"It feels fortunate that you know what the other person is dealing with, when you're writing against a deadline or preparing for a major lecture," Ramazani said. "Caroline and I read each other's work, and we share an intellectual friendship as well as a marital relationship."
English Prof. Herbert Tucker also maintains a literary bond with his wife, Drama Lecturer Betsy Tucker. But while he focuses on nineteenth century literature, she concentrates on acting and directing.
Their departmental separation has not stopped the couple from working and lecturing together, and they occasionally co-teach a USEM course called Shakespeare in Text and Performance.
The Tuckers accepted a joint offer to come to the University in 1986. The couple met their freshman year in college, while he was at Amherst and she at Mt. Holyoke.
Herbert Tucker said he finds teaching with his wife "unusually convenient," and it has "all the charms of novelty to us."
Amused by the fanciful notions people may have about professorial life, he granted that he liked "being surrounded by people unusually committed to excellence in teaching," but emphasized that his days are filled with arduous work and the demands of parenting.
"We're taking out the garbage and driving our children to soccer practice and just living in Charlottesville," Herbert Tucker said. "Sure, I think the noblest thoughts I can," he added, "but I do it while carrying out the compost"
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