English department alumni, faculty and current undergraduate and graduate students address urgent contemporary topics, including the pandemic, the national reckoning with racism, the environment, and the role of arts in times of crisis.
Recent
Monica Huerta, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies | “On Rearrangement,” ArtForum
Anne Cheng, Professor of English | “Waiting for Barbie,” Los Angeles Review of Books
Archive
D. Vance Smith
Professor of English
- "Africa Writes Back: European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong," Aeon, June 17, 2021
Meredith Martin
Associate Professor of English, Princeton University
Virginia Jackson
UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric, University of California, Irvine
- "The Poetry of the Future," Avidly (a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books), January 29, 2021
Anne Cheng
Professor of English
- "What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America," The New York Times, February 21, 2021
- "How Fashion Can Relieve Us From the Burden of Visibility," HYPERALLERGIC, January 28, 2021
- "A Dilemma of Intimacy: An Asian American writer grapples with interracial love in a time of disaster," The Nation, October 21, 2020
- "I'd Rather Be a Witch than a Warrior," Los Angeles Review of Books, October 3, 2020
Rob Nixon
Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment. Professor of English and the Princeton Environmental Institute
- "All Tomorrow's Warnings," at Public Books.org. August 13, 2020
- "Defending Tomorrow Today," Edge Effects, August 6, 2020
- “From Restraining Orders to Assassinations, the Dangerous Work of Saving the Monarchs,” Boston Review July 29, 2020
Adrienne Brown, Ph.D. ’11
Associate Professor, The University of Chicago, Department of English, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
- “Seeing Race in a Pandemic,” Foreign Policy, July 1, 2020
Monica Huerta
Assistant Professor, Department of English
- “Anti-Racism and the Problem of the Soul,” Los Angeles Review of Books June 24, 2020
Joshua Bennett, Ph.D. ’16
Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College
- “Dad Poem” (Ultrasound #2), Poem-a-Day on June 24, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets
Autumn Womack
Assistant Professor, Department of English and African American Studies
- “Can You Be Black and Listen to This,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 1, 2020
Briallen Hopper, Ph.D. ’09
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Queens CUNY
- “Sirenland,” The Yale Review
Ingrid Norton, Ph.D. candidate
- “Plague Memory,” The Point, March 22, 2020
Jeff Dolven
Professor, Department of English
- “The Worst Returns to Laughter,” Cabinet Magazine, March 24, 2020
Lauren Collins ’02
- “Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2020
Joani Etskovitz ’17
- “Making and Measuring Education at Home: From Maria Edgeworth to the Kid Interrupting Your Attempt to Reach These Words,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 6, 2020