News
In November, Rivett’s latest book, “Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation,” was published by Oxford University Press. “Unscripted America” explores the impact of colonial language encounters between indigenous and European populations on Enlightenment language philosophy and early American literary history.
2017 marks the bicentennial of Jane Austen’s death, and people around the world are celebrating the beloved author’s life and legacy. In the spirit of commemoration is the fall course at Princeton, “Jane Austen: Then and Now.”
Eight Princeton junior English majors and one Comparative Literature major are in London this term participating in the English Department's UCL Program. Students live in University College London housing located in the heart of Bloomsbury, just steps from the British Museum. They take their junior seminar with an English professor (this fall, Professor Tamsen Wolff) as well as three additional courses at UCL.
John Kerrigan is a leading Shakespeare scholar and the Professor of English 2000 at the University of Cambridge. This fall, he was the Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English. The Humanities Council’s Short-Term Fellows Program brings scholars from around the world to Princeton for three-to-five intensive days of classes, colloquia and informal discussions. Kerrigan was in Princeton from Oct. 9-12.
Recently Professor Clair Wills discussed her new book, Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar Britain, on the BBC Radio 3 podcast “Free Thinking.” Wills’ new book, just published by Penguin UK, is a portrait of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, viewed through the experiences of both the citizens of empire and the European refugees who fled to Britain during those years.
The 2016-17 Haarlow Prize was awarded to Gunnar Rice ’17 and Tali Pelts ’20 for the two best papers submitted to a 200-level Humanistics Studies course.
Over the summer, Professor Jeff Dolven wrote a book in a day, as part of Cabinet Books’ “24-Hour Book” series. A meditation on the animal testing enterprises of the Braintree Scientific Corporation, the book, Take Care, was printed later that same week, and launched the next month in London.
English professor Esther Schor, biographer of Emma Lazarus, contributed an op-ed article to CNN in response to senior presidential adviser, Stephen Miller's dismissal of Lazurus's poem, "The New Colossus", as a symbol of American liberty "enlightening the world."
Schor states, "Thanks to Emma Lazarus, the message of the Statue of Liberty, for the vast majority of Americans who understand it as a symbol of welcome to immigrants, is not "America First," but "America, at last."
Three outstanding rising seniors attended the Princeton-Bread Loaf Summer Study Program in Oxford. For six weeks they lived in Lincoln College, took a class, and performed intensive senior thesis study under the direction of Princeton faculty member Russ Leo, who guided them through the shoals of advanced library research.
The Stanley Seeger Center in Athens hosted a three-day “retreat” of the International Network for the Comparative Humanities (INCH), co-directed by Professor Maria DiBattista and Notre Dame Professor (and former Princeton PhD) Barry McCrea. INCH is an international consortium that promotes interdisciplinary exchange between faculty and graduate students from English and Comparative Literature with their counterparts overseas.
Recently the Princeton University Players’ staged, for the first time in over 150 years, Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823 melodrama Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Newly titled Frankenstein: The Musical, it was performed to full houses in Chancellor Green Rotunda. This all-student production, an outgrowth of Professor Susan Wolfson’s class on “Frankenstein @ 200,” was produced in recognition of the bicentennial anniversary of Mary Shelley’s novel and was funded by a David A.
Congratulations to Jennifer Soong on her first poem collection being selected for publication by Futurepoem Books.
Graduating senior Lance Rutkin sat down for a wide-ranging and candid conversation with poet Paul Muldoon, Princeton’s Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor and Founding Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. One of "the most significant English-language poets born since the second World War” (TLS), Muldoon spoke with Rutkin about his recent sea voyage around the world, his months-long drive across the United States, and his time in Ireland participating in the centenary events of the 1916 Rising, Easter Week.
Congratulations to English Department seniors, Ugonna Nwabueze '18 and Emma Watkins '18, on winning awards sponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts that provide resources to conduct research, undertake training, and pursue other opportunities critical to achieving their senior thesis project goals.
Hajrah Hussain is a senior from Jersey City, New Jersey, majoring in English and earning certificates in linguistics and global health and health policy. She is a peer health adviser in Forbes College, a UMatter fellow and a member of the Princeton University Mentorship Program. She has also worked as a research assistant in the Department of Sociology, where she studied access to mental health care. She has served as a member of the DREAM Team, the Muslim Students' Association Community Service Chair and was vice president of Tropical Clinics for Rural Health.
To meet the requirements of his major in English and certificates in creative writing, theater and Latino studies, Princeton senior Edwin Rosales had to write not one but two senior theses. The first in his family to go to college, he drew on his own experience of coming to the U.S. from Guatemala as a child and on his extensive research to write a collection of short stories and a play. Rosales said the arts at Princeton empowered him and built his confidence as a writer.
Congratulations to Simon Gikandi on receiving the University's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.
Margaret Wright, a senior majoring in English who is affiliated with Rockefeller College, has taken many classes at Princeton that have taught her how to better articulate and present her opinions. To add to those skills, she said, she would like to focus instead on listening to other people — "not in order to rebut an argument or support a claim, but just to try to understand."
Professor Simon Gikandi's course, "Topics in Literature and Ethics: Modern Evil", is featured on the university website.