News Archive
2020-2021
Was Jane Austen the best-selling novelist of her time? Are all her novels romances? Did they depict the traditional world of the aristocracy? Is Austen’s writing easy to understand? Well into the 21st century, Jane Austen continues to be one of the most compelling novelists in all English literature. Authors Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite joins us to discuss the accepted beliefs ― both true and untrue ―that have most influenced our readings of Austen.
See further information here.
This year’s 2021 cohort finds ten student concentrators as recipients of honors designation for their work within the Department of English. Each department determines honors on the basis of the grades received by the student in departmental studies (including department requirements and cognates, junior independent work, the senior thesis, and the senior departmental examination.)
A virtual Class Day 2021 celebration for the Department of English was held Friday, May 14, 2021 at 4:00 pm.
With over one hundred attendees present on zoom, including concentrators, students, faculty, and friends, the department celebrated our thirty English concentrators from the Class of 2021.
Fifteen Students Recognized with Department of English Undergraduate Prizes
Each year the Department of English’s Undergraduate faculty select from a large pool of student applicants to determine winners for the nine prizes offered by the department. This year, fifteen students were selected as recipients for these nine prizes from a pool of over sixty submissions. The selection was a difficult process as the submissions were exceptional. We would like to celebrate all those who submitted and the students who are recognized below.
Congratulations to Meredith Martin on being named a recipient of the McGraw Center's Graduate Mentoring Award.
The Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities invites proposals for collaborative faculty-student summer research projects. These projects may include examinations of archives, work with data sets, the creation of maps, the development of renderings and/or visualizations, conducting interviews, and other initiatives not listed here.
Congratulations to James,“Jim” Richardson, professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, will transfer to emeritus status on July 1, 2021, after teaching at Princeton for forty-one years. Jim was born January 1, 1950, and grew up in Garden City, New York, not far from where Charles Lindbergh took off in the Spirit of St. Louis on his transatlantic flight. Jim first arrived in Princeton as an undergraduate in 1967. After graduating summa cum laude in 1971, he received his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in 1975.
The Majors' Colloquium addresses a topic that our Undergraduate Advisory Council chooses each year; four faculty members are nominated by the senior class to speak. For 2021, it was professors Autumn Womack, Jeff Nunokawa, Kinohi Nishikawa and Anne Cheng.
Click here to view the event recording.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and a Golden Globe, “Minari” is a delicately wrought drama that follows a Korean-American family that moves to an Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. Tracing the material and emotional challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks for this young family, “Minari” shows the resilience of family and what it means to forge a home when you are seen as strangers from a different land.
Congratulations to RL Goldberg, Mary Naydan and Liora Selinger on being selected to receive a Graduate School Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
Teaching Awards honor those graduate students who have made a significant and exceptional contribution to undergraduate teaching.
In fall 2020, students examined modernist and avant-garde experiments in word and image in the 20th century in the course, “Language to Be Looked At,” co-taught by Joshua Kotin, associate professor of English, and Irene Small, associate professor of art and archaeology. The course was crosslisted in the Program in Humanistic Studies, English, and art and archaeology.
Abolition Then and Now is a collaborative, virtual exhibition put together as part of a final project for a course on the writings of Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the fall of 2020.
A Book Talk and Discussion of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU 2020) with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. April 22, 2021 at 4:30pm via zoom.
Join the Department of English in welcoming our Bain Swiggett Distinguished Visitor in Poetry & Poetics, Virginia Jackson, on March 25th at 4:30pm.
Professor Jackson will discuss a pre-circulated section of Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric in the Nineteenth Century.
Congratulations to Paige Allen, an English Department concentrator, who has been named a co-winner of the 2021 Moses Taylor Pyne Honor Prize, the highest general distinction conferred on an undergraduate.
Allen, from Mountain Top, Pennsylvania, is also pursuing certificates in creative writing, humanistic studies, music theater and theater.
Click here to read the full story on the University homepage.