News
Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, has been awarded by the Council of the Humanities an Old Dominion Fellowship. Appointed for one year, Gikandi will be researching his book The Atlantic Crypt: Slavery and the Cultures of Modernity as well as engaging with colleagues across the University. Old Dominion scholars also serve as Faculty Fellows in Princeton’s Society of Fellows.
Listen to some great poems, selected and recited by poets in the English Department and the Lewis Center for the Arts: Jeff Dolven (Bicycle Stanzas), Paul Muldoon (Ireland), Esther Schor (A Clear Midnight), and Tracy K. Smith (Second Estrangement).
Congratulations to Rasheeda Saka (Class of 2020) who has won a Breakout 8 Writers Prize. Co-sponsored by The Authors Guild (the largest and oldest community of professional writers) and Epiphany: A Literary Journal, the Breakout Prize “celebrates the voices of exciting student writers.” The award includes a cash prize along with publication in the forthcoming spring/summer issue of Epiphany. Rasheeda Saka is a fiction writer who has studied with Neel Mukherjee, Angela Flournoy, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
English majors and faculty get together for the annual Majors Colloquium. Russ Leo, Bradin Cormack, Sarah Anderson, and Christina León offered their thoughts on this year's theme "Why Words Matter." Afterwards the department adjourned to the rotunda in Chancellor Green for more conversation, a catered meal, and a celebration of our graduating seniors.
Novelist Kamila Shamsie visited Prof Zahid Chaudhary and Daniel Hazard’s collaboratively taught course, ENG374: Cultures of Protest. Shamsie’s recent novel, Home Fire, is an interpretation of Antigone set during the contemporary war on terror.
Miranda Marraccini, a graduate student in the Department of English, was selected as a 2018 Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellow in Women’s Studies. Marraccini’s dissertation, “Feminist Types: Reading the Victoria Press,” uses digital humanities methods and archival scholarship to develop a new understanding of nineteenth-century feminist print culture. This semester, Marraccini is co-teaching “Virtual Victorians” with Professor Meredith Martin through Princeton’s Collaborative Teaching Initiative.
Susan Wolfson's new book, Romantic Shades and Shadows, published by John Hopkins University Press will be released in May.
Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language, formations, and sensations, defining an apparitional poetics in the finely grained textures of writing and their effects on present reading.
English major, Jack Lohmann's research project, “Nauru”, with supervision by Professor Robert Nixon, has been selected for support from the Smith-Newton Scholars Program in the Princeton Environmental Institute.
Monique Allewaert, author of Ariel’s Ecology: Personhood and Colonialism in the American Tropics, 1760-1820, visited the Department as a Humanities Council Short-Term Fellow. Allewaert, who specializes in 18th and 19th century American literature, colonialism, New World plantations, ecocriticism, and political philosophy, presented work from her new book project Cut Up: Colonial Insectophilia and Enlightenment from Below.
Prof. Zahid Chaudhary and Daniel Hazard's collaboratively taught course, ENG374: Fighting Words, or Cultures of Protest, involves students in an upcoming exhibition at the Princeton Art Museum, entitled “Picturing Protest.” Students will each write explanatory labels for two artworks, and their labels will become a part of the artwork’s online record. The course includes two visits to the museum’s study room where the students discuss the artworks to be included in the exhibition.
Princeton senior Ugonna Nwabueze, a first-generation Nigerian American, has undertaken two creative thesis projects — an original play and a production of the play “Eclipsed,” in which she played a leading role — to meet the requirements for her English major and certificates in African studies, African American studies and theater.
Writers need readers—and in the present moment, many academic writers are seeking ways to address a broader and more diverse readership. At the panel discussion “Writing in Public,” five members of the Princeton community shared how their work outside the academy relates to their scholarship, and how writing for different audiences has increasingly become a part of their profession, especially as early career academics.
Deadline for applications (extended): Friday, April 6th, 2018.
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.