Department of English at Princeton Annual Report 2023-24
Table of Contents
Letter from the Chair
Faculty Accomplishments
Enlarging Our Understanding
Special Events Organized by and/or Featuring
Department of English Faculty
2023–24 Magic Grants
Close-up on Postwar New York
Graduate Colloquia
Our Intellectual Community Humanities Council Visiting Fellows
Frances Ferguson
R. Darren Gobert
Robert Sullivan
John Durham Peters
Teaching and Learning
Letter from the Director of Undergraduate Studies
Letter from the Director of Graduate Studies
2023–24 Graduate Student Outcomes
New Directions in Teaching Study Abroad
Visiting Early Modern London: ‘The Purpose of Playing’
Bread Loaf Summer at Oxford Prizes
Teaching Faculty and Lecturers in the Department of English, 2023–24
Our Staff Community (Inside Back Cover)
Letter from the Chair
Dear Colleagues,
I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the Department of English’s annual report for the academic year 2023-24. The academic year started with the department’s collective desire to move beyond the institutional and personal problems presented by the Covid pandemic and a determination to regroup its intellectual forces and reinvigorate our energies as a pedagogical and scholarly community. This desire to begin anew was tempered by the crisis generated by the war in the Middle East whose reverberations could be felt around McCosh Hall for most of the spring. The department could not, of course, be isolated from what was happening around it, but as you will see in this report, the academic year was marked by notable achievements in teaching, increased dedication to the community, and outstanding scholarship.
The proposal for a minor that the department submitted to the Dean of the College was exemplary, a model for other humanities departments.
I’m happy to report that the department is already attracting students majoring in other fields and divisions to the minor, and we are excited about the new additions to our community.
At the undergraduate level, the department was able to institute changes in the curriculum in anticipation of the introduction of an English minor. The proposal for a minor that the department submitted to the Dean of the College was exemplary, a model for other humanities departments. I’m happy to report that the department is already attracting students majoring in other fields and divisions to the minor and we are excited about the new additions to our community. In the meantime, the number of English majors has stabilized, and we expect incremental growth in the next few years. I’m especially pleased to see the variety of courses and range of opportunities that the department has offered to both its majors, minors, and the general student body at Princeton University.
Our courses, which range from the study of voice in Old English to digital humanities, environmental studies, cinema and different forms of media are transforming the humanities at Princeton. Our signature courses in American television, American cinema, and children’s literature are some of the most popular at the University. As Russ Leo, our energetic director of undergraduate studies, notes in this report, the department had much to celebrate on Class Day at the end of May 2024. Our graduating seniors wrote what Leo aptly describes as “exciting and ambitious theses,” with many being honored with awards across the University. This report contains stories and profiles of recent alumni who have used their degrees in English as pathways to graduate studies in some of the most prominent departments in the country and distinguished careers in other fields.
The nature of the courses we have offered at the graduate level reflect the department’s broad approach to historical periods, its attentiveness to theoretical and cultural questions in literary studies, and its openness to the broadest definition of the literary. The list of topics offered in English graduate colloquia is a testament to the department’s commitment to a capacious definition and redefinition of English. Our graduate program continues to be highly regarded, attracting almost 400 applications in any given year, and our graduate students continue to win some of the most prestigious awards at the Graduate School, including the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, the Graduate School’s highest award.
In a period when employment opportunities for new doctoral recipients have constricted, we had occasion to celebrate the achievements of recent Ph.D. graduates in the department who have taken up academic or
administrative positions at leading colleges and universities around the country. As Joshua Kotin, the dynamic director of graduate studies, notes in this report, the flurry of final public oral examinations in the spring “was an occasion to learn about pathbreaking research, engage in vibrant debate, and reaffirm the department’s commitment to graduate teaching and collective inquiry.”
The quality of research reflected in the publications and presentations of our faculty is equally impressive. New and forthcoming books on photography and the law, data and prosody, Shakespearean tragedy, cultural criticism, critical essays on Native American and Indigenous literary traditions and the emergence of the novel in a global context, are just a sampling of the work being done by our faculty. As in past years, our faculty have been asked to provide their expertise to leading cultural and governmental institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Slought in Philadelphia, and the National Gallery of Art and Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Members of our faculty have presented, or are scheduled to present, some of the most prestigious public lectures, including the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale and the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford.
Particularly notable in this report are the innovations our faculty are making in teaching and research and in expanding the intellectual culture at the University. Collaborative teaching between faculty and graduate students has led to transformations in our pedagogy, and we continue to develop courses in collaboration with other units such as the Council for the Humanities and the Program in Journalism. Our collaborations have been both global and local. At the global level, our faculty continue to be central to the pedagogical mission of projects, including the International Network for Comparative Humanities (INCH), and the Bread Loaf School of English at Oxford University. At the local level, the department has supported outreach initiatives to the larger community in Mercer County arts, including the Invisible City theater project in Trenton.
During the year, faculty and graduate students organized lectures that brought some distinguished scholars to Princeton. Among the notable public lectures sponsored by the department was the Eberhard L. Faber Class of 1915 Memorial Lecture in Literature presented by Wai Chee Dimock; a conference on Troubadours and Sonneteers, a three-lecture series on Ecologies of Nature, Poetry, and Ethics presented by James Porter; and the Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture presented by Dr. Samah Jabr, the distinguished Palestinian physician. Walking into McCosh Hall, in the course of the year I was delighted by encounters with some of the most prominent scholars in the fields of postcolonial poetics, African American literature, global modernism and cultural criticism.
During the year, the department welcomed Robert Spoo, a distinguished scholar of law and literature, as the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters and professor of English. Behind the scenes, our work has been supported by an outstanding staff led by Tamara Thatcher, our department manager, and I salute them for helping us negotiate the complexities of everyday institutional life.
As chair, I remain confident that the department will continue to thrive even amidst the challenges facing the humanities nationally, and I look forward to new initiatives and ongoing projects planned for the next few years, including a humanities and data science summer seminar; the Land, Language, and Art Initiative (LLA), and the Baldwin Circles, a community reading project honoring the centenary of James Baldwin. I hope this report gives you a sense of our work in the past academic year and our aspirations, and I thank you all, our faculty, students, alumni, and friends, for your continuing support.
Simon Gikandi, Class of 1943 University Professor of English and Chair
The Next Chapter: Alumni Interview
Cammie Lee, A. B. ’22
Communications Assistant, Princeton University Department of Music
How did study in English at Princeton prepare and/or help you in the work you do now?
While teaching English in South Korea, I found similarities between writing and lesson planning. At my school, I was expected to teach my students something about “American culture,” and it helped if I had a clear argument. Centering each class around a thesis statement made it easier for me to scaffold my lessons. I found myself thinking about the sequencing of my lessons much as I might think about the structure of a written argument: certain information needed to be presented first, in order for everything that followed to make sense. Ultimately, writing and teaching are both forms of transmission, and I believe my intuition as a writer helped me in my teaching.
What advice would you give yourself today if you were just starting at Princeton?
Listen to your intuition and lean into the process. Stop saying “I think” or “I guess,” because how you say something matters just as much as what you say. Nurture your capacity for introspection and reflection, but don’t be too self-indulgent (because, as a writer, you inevitably will be); talk to more people and ask more questions.
What about Princeton do you feel most nostalgic for?
By my senior year at Princeton, I had discovered an idyllic community oriented around creative and intellectual play. My roommate and I ran an underground café out of our apartment, which we opened weekly to friends, acquaintances, and the occasional non-Princeton affiliated stranger. A musician friend hosted Butch Morris-inspired Conduction workshops, where people brought instruments and other odd objects to improvise together; I remember someone once brought raw eggs in a pan. I regularly convened with a circle of friends new and old to participate in a series of experimental gatherings, which we named after clauses of Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of the Erotic.” My undergraduate experience had been marred by the pandemic, but all these activities — from the café to the gatherings of Lorde — were earnest attempts to reimagine community post-Covid, and build something better than what we had before. These experiences exist outside Princeton too, but I have found it difficult to build and maintain community in quite the same way when everyone is constantly on the move, dispersed throughout the city/country/world.
What’s the most interesting book, article, film or other English major-y text you’ve come across recently?
“The Virtual Sentence: A Book of Exercises,” edited by Jeff Dolven. Reminiscent of Fluxus event scores and an elementary English workbook, the book disarms AI by demonstrating how its data-driven algorithmic structure generates limitless possibilities when co-opted by real people.
What turning-point, choice or decision in your life after Princeton has been most unexpected?
Six months after graduating, I moved to South Korea and taught English for a year. I imagined I would return to America after my year abroad and immediately snap back into my life in the States. But I got very sick towards the end of my grant year and decided that for my physical and mental health, I needed to move back home for a bit. It was difficult to retreat to Portland — I felt a sense of defeat — but I think it was important for me to renegotiate my relationship with family and home. I am reminded of The Poetics of Space, in which Gaston Bachelard suggests that the childhood home remains “physically inscribed in us,” even after we graduate onto the next place. “When we return to the old house… the earliest gestures suddenly come alive,” he writes. It is easy to grow comfortable in the old suit, but comfort breeds complacency, and in my case, I think I needed to confront my inner child in order to move on.
Faculty Accomplishments
Sarah M. Anderson
My teaching and research work this year arcs around voice — creaturely voices and silenced creatures. In “Unwitting Oxen: Visual Language and Verbal Play in Four Old English Riddles,” I investigate how, through the Old English riddle form, enslaved people are voiced by similarly bound and bullied bovines (Animalia, Liverpool UP, 2024). Research in progress, which will lead to an article and two scheduled talks, follows the production and transmission of an early 16th-century Icelandic manuscript that not only holds copies of sagas, but also retains traces of people who read and responded to the texts and clues to the crafting of this codex in a littlestudied period in Scandinavia. My classes resonate with the theme of “voice.” My Old English seminar will inspect lesser-known texts like charms and rituals: we’ll work with the linguistic phenomena of this stage of English, as well as with material texts of textile,
metal, and stone, not because the reading practices required of texts and of things is the same but precisely because they are different. My research and course development aims to restore voice not just to texts, but also to under-represented people.
Eduardo Cadava
I had a wonderful experience in the summer of 2023 teaching a global seminar in Greece. Sponsored by PIIRS and the Seeger Center, the course
was titled “A Land of Light and Shadows: Modern Greek Literature and Photography.”
Reading texts by modern Greek poets, we traveled throughout Greece to experience the landscape described by these writers. Students also worked with Greek photographers to produce their own portfolio of images. My book Politically Red, co-authored with Sara Nadal-Melsió, received honorable mention for the 2024 René Wellek Prize awarded by the American Comparative
Sarah M. Anderson
Eduardo L. Cadava
Ploughing Cotton MS Julius A VI, f. 3r. 11th Century.
Right: Princeton Athens Center. Courtesy of the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies.
Literature Association. I continued my involvement in the Exposure project. Supported by the Dean for Research Innovation Fund and HMEI and including a team of artists, scientists, and engineers, the project focuses on environmental justice issues in the Red Rock Wilderness surrounding Bears Ears and Grand StaircaseEscalante National Monuments in southern Utah. Building on work by photographer Fazal Sheikh, we have been documenting the effects of extractive industries on public and Native lands. In March 2024, we built a second water system, this time in Monument Valley, and students again traveled with us to help lay down the pipeline. The project is presently being exhibited at the Denver Art Museum.
Anne Cheng
My new book of essays, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, is forthcoming from Pantheon this September 2024. There will be various book events, including a reading and conversation with Jia Tolentino
and Cathy Park Hong at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York on October 3. All welcome!
I spent my sabbatical year as a MoMA Scholar in Residence. At MoMA I participated in various activities from acquisition to exhibition planning. While there I also contributed to a series of public events, including giving a talk on newly made public collages by early 20th-century architect Eileen Gray, and participating in a collective discussion on the idea of the flat surface in Modernism, and in conversations with video artist Kenneth Tam about Asian American masculinity and with Sherrilyn Ifill on racial triangulation in the United States. Finally, I contributed an essay for the catalogue of the forthcoming Ruth Asawa retrospective exhibition. This summer I will be leading a series of study sessions for The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis while continuing my work at the museum. I look forward to returning to teaching in the fall.
Anne Cheng, “Waiting for Barbie”:
“Months later, my father returned, saw me playing with the miniature clothes, and asked where I had put the doll. The doll? What doll? It never occurred to me or my mother that there would have been an owner for these impossibly perfect little clothes. My parents suspected that some rogue customs agent must have filched said doll. […] What I had thought was the best toy turned out to have been mere accessories,
circling, unbeknownst to me, a missing center, the real toy: Barbie herself.”
Read “Waiting for Barbie” in the Los Angeles Review of Books
Maria DiBattista
This past year marked the 10th anniversary of the International Network for the Comparative Humanities, or INCH, which I founded to promote international exchanges between our graduate students and their European counterparts. Thanks to the partnerships we have forged and consolidated over the years, for the first time both our yearly 3-day workshops overseas were hosted by our sister institutions. We met in Strasbourg and the Certosa di Pontignano, a reconverted monastery outside of Siena, to initiate a new round of discussions on the theme that will occupy us for the next two years: Origins / Extinction / Survival. Somewhat coincidentally, this year I was honored and touched to be awarded the University’s Graduate Mentoring Award.
Anne Anlin Cheng
Maria DiBattista
Faculty Accomplishments
“I think it’s a puzzle for all of us what to do with — or even just how to be in the presence of — a work of art. Here we are together. Well, what do we do now?”
—Jeff Dolven
This year also saw the publication of a piece on one of my cinematic idols, Ernst Lubitsch. Entitled “Miriam Hopkins Learns to Wink” it celebrates Hopkins’s importance for Lubitsch’s (witty) transition from silent to talking pictures.
Jeff Dolven
My year saw the publication of two short books, both collaborative. The first is an exchange of letters with Josh Kotin about the poet J. H. Prynne’s Parkland, entitled The Parkland Mysteries We read the book together, trading ideas; sometimes Prynne (copied on the emails that were our first draft) chimed in. The second is an edited collection of exercises in sentence prediction, The Virtual Sentence, assembled to counter the preemptions of Gmail, Grammerly, and other writing helpers. We launched it in Berlin with an event that organized the audience as a large language model to compete in ingenuity with Chat-GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Meanwhile, another longstanding collaborative project, the historical collective ESTAR(SER), took a step into the light with a New Yorker article about the Order of the Third
Bird. Through it all, the graduate Spenser group met every Monday. We are now in the middle of Book IV of The Faerie Queene. A challenging year was still good for working together.
Read more of Jeff’s thoughts on the Order of the Third Bird in The New Yorker
Sophie Gee
In 2023-24 I was invited to be the Inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Sydney University, collaborating across disciplines and divisions in the university to build public humanities. I am also leading a team at Sydney on “good disagreement” – ways to move beyond polarization and use discomfort and uncertainty for social and intellectual good.
I completed the manuscript of my book The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World, which is in contract with Princeton UP, and I wrote essays on the history of the novel, Henry Fielding’s empire and the impact of the humanities on businesses, both published and forthcoming.
I started a podcast called “The Secret Life of Books” with Jonty Claypole, MBE, former head of arts at the BBC in London.
Scan to listen to The Secret Life of Books
Simon Gikandi
Most of my energies in the last year were invested in departmental and University service. In addition to serving as chair of the English department, I was an elected member of the faculty advisory committee on diversity,
and I chaired the editorial board of Princeton University Press. I continued work on “Imagining Decolonization: African Literature and its Public 1890-1980,” a monograph on the emergence of Modern African Literature and “Otherwise Modernism,” a work on the aesthetic of global Blackness. A new second edition of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman was published by Norton. I had essays and reviews on Afro-Atlantic Modernism published in Black Modernisms, edited by Steven Nelson and Huey Copeland III, October, and Comparative Literature
A selection of my essays will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025, and I will present the “Afterlives of Atlantic Slavery” lecture at All Souls College, Oxford in spring 2025.
William A. Gleason
This year I was pleased to contribute a chapter on “Representations of Leisure” to Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Leisure in the Modern Age (2024), the sixth and final volume in “the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of leisure from
Jeff Dolven
Sophie Gee
Simon Gikandi
William A. Gleason
ancient times to modernity.” My chapter examines depictions of leisure from 1920 to the present across a broad range of art forms, including painting, sculpture, photography, children’s literature, pop music, films, and video games. I was also delighted to help usher into print The Pocket Instructor: Writing (2024), edited by Amanda Irwin Wilkins and Keith Shaw. This hands-on guide “for teaching students the core elements of successful academic writing” is the second volume in Princeton University Press’s Pocket Instructor series, for which my colleague Diana Fuss and I proudly serve as series editors.
Monica Huerta
My book, The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism was published last summer, and has been reviewed in Lambda Literary Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and has forthcoming reviews in American Literary History, American Quarterly, and Photography and Culture. In the last year, I was chosen as an artist fellow in residence for
the Banff International Curatorial Institute convened by Tina Campt and Macarena Gómez Barris, where we focused on cultivating sustainable art writing practices in community. The three weeks in Banff were an incredible gift to my writing. This month, my article “Realism’s Reputations, Financialized Whiteness” appeared in the new issue of American Literature And last November, I published a feature essay in ArtForum that began as a review of the “You Belong Here: People, Place, and Purpose in Latinx Photography” exhibition sponsored by Aperture and curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opening in Los Angeles in 2025. Thinking with those amazing artists led me to my next book project and a new course I am teaching in the spring on contemporary Latinx photography.
Read “You Belong Here” on ArtForum
Claudia Johnson
I hosted Bob Sullivan’s visit as a short-term Council of the Humanities Fellow. Bob’s visit attracted faculty, students, and staff interested in creative writing, environmental studies, literary study, and American history. In addition to the usual lecture and seminar, Bob also hosted a delightful walk through Princeton to tour the trees, stones, houses and battlefield that are part of our environment.
I also offered two packed Wintersession workshops on letterpress printing.
Joshua Kotin
Over the last year, I published a short book about the poet J.H. Prynne, The Parkland Mysteries, co-written with my colleague, Jeff Dolven. I also published an article about rejected manuscripts and literary history, “Archives of Rejection,” in the journal American Literary History. Finally, I co-edited a collection of essays, The World of Shakespeare and Company, with my colleague Rebecca Sutton Koeser from the Center for Digital Humanities. The collection was co-published as a special issue by the journals Modernism/modernity and the Journal of Cultural Analytics, and
Monica Huerta
Claudia Johnson
Joshua Kotin
The Next Chapter: Alumni Interview
Daniel Johnson, Ph.D. ’16
Co-Interim Director, Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship English; Digital Humanities; and Film, Television, and Theatre Librarian University of Notre Dame
How did study in English at Princeton prepare and/or help you in the work you do now?
I am now into my ninth year as an academic librarian at the University of Notre Dame, a faculty position that entails collection development, scholarship, and teaching (usually through consultations and research-methods workshops rather than through credit bearing courses). In recent years, I’ve added “Film, Television, and Theatre” to my original specializations of English literature and digital humanities, and I also currently serve as interim co-director of the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. Administrative duties are heavier than ever, but I am very fortunate to be able to use the scholarly training I received at Princeton directly in my work, for both collection development and research projects. For example, a few years ago I developed an electronic edition of John Keats’s heavily annotated copy of Paradise Lost (keatslibrary.org) in collaboration with 19th-century English scholars Greg Kucich and the late Beth Lau — a connection forged through the inimitable sociability of Susan Wolfson. My experiences in the Princeton English department, and with friends in the Firestone Library and the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH), laid the groundwork for continuing engagements with text at the intellectual, social, physical, and digital levels.
What advice would you give yourself today if you were just starting at Princeton?
Explore widely, because you’ll never know where sideline activities will lead you. I took coursework outside of the English department, added some part-time jobs in the Princeton library system, and jumped in with the digital humanities folks at the CDH, and these broader experiences helped me in establishing my career. But it is easy to lose sight of opportunities when trying to finish coursework or write the dissertation. John Logan gave a wonderful introduction to book history in the old Scribner Room of Firestone Library, stressing the importance of exploring strange textual cruxes by going back to original witnesses, but I didn’t visit special collections often enough or witness the operations of letterpress printing until after Princeton. Even more mundane managerial experiences — inviting guest speakers, scheduling conference sections, budgeting refreshments, participating in university or departmental governance — can be eye-opening and attractive on the job market. Almost any role in academia is going to involve administrative and service work at some point. Try it out; explore.
What turning-point, choice or decision in your life after Princeton has been most unexpected?
Recently my work has taken a surprising turn into new media with the establishment and continuing development of a Legacy Technology Collection, what I call the rare books of digital humanities. English faculty such as Maryland’s Matthew Kirschenbaum have conducted fascinating research on computational media and literature — for example, his Track Changes (2016), a “literary history of word processing” — and I’ve been making the case that media technologies need to be preserved both in original form and in emulation to make the cultural record available for future readers and scholars. To that end, I have been serving on the Software Preservation Network and have presented at two conferences this summer on digital preservation challenges and opportunities, exploring comparisons between video games, e-literature, the early printing press, and 18th-century coffee-house culture. The heterogenous threads of my Princeton experience continue to surface and combine in fun and edifying ways.
The Next Chapter: Alumni Interview
Annabel Barry, A. B. ’19
Ph.D. candidate in English, UC Berkeley
How did study in English at Princeton prepare and/or help you in the work you do now?
I’m currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley. I’m working on a dissertation about feminism, ordinary language philosophy, and Irish women’s writing from 1800 to the present. In contrast to ordinary language philosophers like J.L. Austin, the writers I study respond to speech situations that are dually skewed along colonial and gendered lines by theorizing modes of linguistic action that take place unpredictably and over long temporalities; highlighting the worldmaking power of minor and feminized speech acts; and portraying uses of language that counterintuitively draw their strength from the absence or obfuscation of intention.
The summer between my sophomore and junior years at Princeton, I received a grant from the Lewis Center for the Arts to travel along the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and, with the invaluable support and camaraderie of Sarah Anderson, I developed this experience into a junior paper about alternative representations of the border in contemporary Irish art and poetry. The following year, I had the opportunity to work on a senior thesis about fever in Romantic literature, including a chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism, with Susan Wolfson. Her patient, extensive marginal annotations in my drafts — always pushing me to think harder, clarify my terms, contract my exposition, and vivify my prose — shaped my writing to this day. But, more importantly, she taught me to believe that I have something to say about texts and the world. These independent research projects were formative to my decision to pursue a Ph.D. in English, and my research continues to draw on what I learned from working one-on-one with meticulous and generous advisers. There’s really no match for that aspect of the undergraduate experience at Princeton English.
What about Princeton do you feel most nostalgic for?
I’m nostalgic for “studying” (talking about random topics) late into the night with friends on the top floor of Scheide Caldwell House!
What turning-point, choice or decision in your life after Princeton has been most unexpected?
In 2020, I was living in Ireland slightly more than midway through a yearlong postgraduate fellowship when the pandemic struck. I ended up back in the United States, without a clear plan for the future months. On a whim, a friend and I decided to move to Baltimore to join a quarantine pod with two other close friends. I got a job at a small arts nonprofit that provides career training and public art apprenticeship to creative young people in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area. It was rejuvenating to slow down and focus on spending time with friends and (safely) exploring a new environment — from camping in the Shenandoah Valley to enjoying “snowballs.” While I did continue with my original plan of applying for English Ph.D. programs, this unexpected interval gave me an opportunity to develop my commitment to the public arts and humanities, as well as to teaching and mentorship within and beyond the university. I draw from this experience when I lead a classroom, when I talk with my undergraduate students about their ambitions during office hours, and when I write essays and reviews for public audiences.
Faculty Accomplishments
includes an article that I co-wrote with Fedor Karmanov, a Ph.D. student in our department, about the development of modernism and writing by women. On campus, I hosted a series of events about the art and culture of postwar New York, and formed the Shakespeare and Company Project Lab with colleagues and students. The lab is currently writing its first article about the circulation of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Paris.
A close-up on the series Postwar New York and Beyond is featured in this report in Enlarging Our Understanding.
Explore The World of Shakespeare and Company
Rhodri Lewis
I was on leave for the fall semester of 2023, and spent most of my time tidying up the proofs (and completing the index) for my new book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art — which will be coming out with Princeton University Press in October 2024. I gave talks drawn from it in New York and Boston, and in Cambridge, Birmingham, and London in the
UK, and look forward to several other tie-in events once it’s out there in the world. Otherwise, I’ve been continuing work on my biography of Frank Kermode, which (in addition to two completed chapters), now has a working title: Rage for Order: A Life of Frank Kermode I’ve also carried on reviewing for Prospect, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Literary Review; my subjects ranged from Noel Malcolm’s astonishingly good history of early modern homosexuality to Marilynne Robinson’s new account of Genesis (of which the least said the better), via a cluster of books to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio being published (a mixed bag), some novelistic reworkings of Shakespeare’s Henry V and Macbeth (ditto), and a history of Antony and Cleopatra criticism (very solid). My first major piece on Kermode, “Kermode’s War,” should have been published in Raritan by the time you read this.
the Nineteenth-Century Data Collective and continue to serve as a trustee for the English Institute. This coming year is the 10-year anniversary of the Center for Digital Humanities at
“We care less about the First Folio itself than we do about its contents […] the only surviving texts of 18 plays ranging from the beginning to the end of Shakespeare’s career.”
—Rhodri Lewis
Read Rhodi Lewis’s reviews of books marking the First Folio’s 400th anniversary
Meredith Martin Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody is in production with Princeton University Press. I was honored to deliver the keynote address at the DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) conference in Lisbon. I now edit the Journal of Cultural Analytics along with
Princeton, where our project Humanities for AI has seeded several new research collaborations at the border of humanistic and machine learning, including a project on African text technologies, handwritten text recognition for ancient languages, and a project on exercises in literary style, in collaboration with the Princeton Language and Intelligence Initiative. I participated in numerous committees, workshops, seminars, and forums about the humanities and AI, and continue to serve as the representative from the humanities on committees about research computing, interdisciplinary data science, and the Princeton AI Lab Initiative.
Kinohi Nishikawa I was elected President of the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) in January. The BSA fosters the study of books and other textual artifacts in a global frame, and it is the publisher of the bibliographical and textual scholarship journal PBSA. During
Rhodri Lewis
Meredith Martin
Kinohi Nishikawa
Doodle drawn by
Jojo Karlin
the academic year, I was a featured speaker at the Yale Romance Fiction Conference, Princeton’s Humanities Council Colloquium, and the Brandeis Novel Symposium, in which I presented a paper on Percival Everett’s Erasure. I wrote the afterword for McNally Editions’ 2023 reissue of Alston Anderson’s short-story collection Lover Man, and my chapter “Print Culture and Literary Sociology” appeared in the volume The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature, edited by Yogita Goyal.
Rob Nixon
In April, I delivered the 2024 Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Yale on the subject of “Ecology and Equity: Environmental Justice Revisited.” The first lecture was titled “Breathing Room: Environmental Justice, Environmental Neuroscience, and the Nature Cure.” The second was “The Less Selfish Gene: Neoliberalism, the Wood Wide Web, and Networked Life.” Print versions of the lectures — and the interdisciplinary roundtable that ensued — will appear in fall 2024 in the Collected Tanner Lectures
Robbie Richardson I delivered the 2024 Garnett Sedgewick lecture to the English department at the University of British Columbia, where I spoke about art from Northwest Coast Indigenous nations that was brought to Britain in the 18th century. Elders from the Nuu-chah-nulth nation, whose ancestors first greeted Captain Cook at Nootka Sound in 1778, attended the talk. I was also an invited speaker at Yale University’s Global History of Indigenous Thought symposium, where I spoke about Mi’gmaw
hieroglyphic writing, and was an invited speaker at Cambridge University, the Huntington Library and the University of Passau. I was awarded a Humboldt Senior Researcher Fellowship in Germany, which I will take up starting next summer at the Free University of Berlin. I wrote a chapter on Jonathan Swift’s relationship with colonialism for the book Jonathan Swift in Context, published this year by Cambridge University Press.
Esther (Starry) Schor
For Princeton’s Humanities Council, I have recently developed “Baldwin Circles,” a community reading project honoring the centenary of James Baldwin (editor’s note: Schor serves as Humanities Council Chair). I continue my research on a biography of Horace M. Kallen. In May, I presented on Kallen’s work in city planning at the AJHS Scholars’ Conference; this fall, I will speak about Kallen in Eastern Europe as the William and Sadie Effron Lecturer at Marist College. My collaborative
Rob Nixon
Robbie Richardson
Esther (Starry) Schor
Rob Nixon lecturing at Yale
Photo courtesy of Yale University
Faculty Accomplishments
“conversation” with Ilan Stavans about Esperanto dictionaries will soon be published by Cambridge University Press. Last fall I organized and led a seminar on “Stevens’s Harmonium at 100” at the Association of Literary Critics, Scholars and Writers conference in Houston (an excellent place to watch the eclipse). I serve on the editorial board of the Jewish Review of Books, and the advisory boards of Restless Books and the Esperantic Studies Foundation.
Nigel Smith
It was a year of grand platforms, and I was honored to give the Ernst R. Curtius [father of comparative literature] Lecture at Bonn University, Germany; a John U. Nef Seminar at the University of Chicago John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought; and the George Richardson Lecture, the senior Quaker studies lecture in the UK. I completed six articles, as many as I have managed outside a leave year, including one on David Bowie. The most enjoyable part of the year, in addition to teaching excellent classes with our superb graduate student Pasquale Toscano (on Milton, epic and disability), and with my colleague from the German department Sally Poor (on medieval and early modern romance), was running the conference Troubadours and Sonneteers: Global Culture, Performance and the Matter of Display in April: a uniformly high-quality set of
papers by a star-studded set of speakers, with music performances by Jesse Rodin and Cut Circle (sacred early choral music); John Lacombe and Abby Butler (17th-century lute songs); and the Unheard Melodies Project, Rogue Oliphant with Paul Muldoon and Wesley Stace (all very much the here and now).
D. Vance Smith
This year Arts in the Invisible City worked with artist and activist Bentrice Jesu. Listening to Trentonians, and using archives and databases, we critique the work of non-profits, government agencies, and development initiatives. We model how to work with community partners, and above all to learn how to listen closely to the narratives that Trentonians themselves share. The Trenton artists we work with demonstrate how beauty is both a strategy of refusal and a way of imagining the history of Trenton as otherwise. Bentrice Jusu’s Potential Project is an extraordinary example of how to reject the narratives of trauma that are forced on Trenton, and how to celebrate the beauty of the lives that have been lost and of those who bear witness to that loss. This semester we are working with Trenton’s Passage Theatre to develop a play about the educational asymmetries between Trenton and Princeton, based on interviews with a range of narrators.
Robert Spoo
My article “Copyright, Copytext, and the Color of the Air” is forthcoming in Ulysses Forty Years: A Critical Retrospective of Hans Walter Gabler’s Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses (Clemson University Press). “Can Literature Cure Law? Should It?” was published in Public Books (March 5, 2024) and “The Public Domain” is forthcoming in Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature (Elgar Publishing), a volume of which I’m also co-editor.
I delivered the University of Toronto Faculty of Law 2024’s Grafstein Lecture in Communications, “The Communicating Commons: Varieties of the Public Domain in Modern Literature and Culture,” and “Infringing Dorian: Copyright, Photography, and Privacy in Oscar Wilde’s Novel,” at the conference Oscar Wilde, Sexuality, and the State, held by the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. At Princeton, I presented “Norms, Copyrights, and the Literary Public Domain” at the Program in Law and Normative Thinking retreat for Princeton law-engaged faculty, and “Strange Life Cycle: Works Enter the Public Domain, But How Do They Get There?” in Princeton University Library Rare Books and Special Collections.
Can Literature Cure Law? Should it?
Susan Wolfson
Along with my energetic seminar for our junior majors and a terrific group in Romanticism, I’ve had
Nigel Smith
D. Vance Smith
Robert Spoo
Susan Wolfson
quite an adventure with graduate student Piper Winkler developing an article (forthcoming in Essays in Criticism) on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism, sparked by the peculiar situation of a unique copy (one of only six known) in the Rare Book Division at Firestone Library; the big subject is the suppression of unorthodox opinion (Necessity got Shelley expelled from Oxford, and was immediately put to flames). I’ve enjoyed several post-publication lectures and conversations related to On Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2023), as timely now as it was in 1792. My continuing relays of teaching and writing are reflected in “Robert Frost: Teaching and the Pleasure of Ulteriority” (2023), on which I’ve also lectured. The 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death has me giving a paper in Rome, and co-organizing an international zoom-reading of his hilarious political satire, “The Vision of Judgment ”
The Next Chapter: Alumni Interview
Sylvie Thode, A.B. ’20
Ph.D. candidate in English, UC Berkeley
How did your study at Princeton English prepare and/ or help you in the work you do now?
Truth be told, as a Ph.D. candidate in an English department, I haven’t really strayed too far from my study at Princeton English! My dissertation project, which is on the status of the individual in HIV/AIDS literature and queer theory, actually has its early roots in my senior thesis, advised by Esther Schor. I would also say that Princeton English’s focus on close reading remains a guiding light for my work. I find myself regularly thinking back to seminars with Jeff Dolven, Josh Kotin, Tamsen Wolff, Jeff Nunokawa, and other brilliant Princeton professors as models for both my thinking and my teaching here at UC Berkeley.
What advice would you give yourself today if you were just starting at Princeton?
Two things. The first is straightforward: take advantage of the study abroad opportunities that Princeton offers! I feel very grateful to have traveled quite a bit during college with the university’s financial support. The second is a little more abstract. I wish I could tell my younger self to stay focused on my own interests, rather than getting caught up in what I thought others wanted me to do.
What do you feel most nostalgic for about Princeton?
The beautiful study spaces! I spent a lot of time in Firestone, Chancellor Green, and Murray Dodge Café, and as much as I love Berkeley, there’s really nothing like Princeton’s architecture. I also miss the charming, well-worn stairwells of McCosh. Oh, and Small World!
What’s the most interesting book, article, film or other English major-y text you’ve come across recently?
Tough question! I recently read and appreciated Christian Lorentzen’s article “Literature Without Literature” in Granta, which tackles questions about publishing and marketability that have been making waves in literary studies for the past few years. I’ve also been very, very slowly making my way through some Proust this summer.
What turning-point, choice or decision in your life after Princeton has been most unexpected?
I never could have imagined myself moving across the country. I grew up in New York City as part of a very close-knit family, so moving to California was pretty unthinkable. As it turns out, though, I’ve loved the Bay Area and its unparalleled combination of gorgeous natural landscapes and vibrant culture. I’m glad to have made the leap.
Enlarging Our Understanding
Special Events at Princeton
Organized by and/or Featuring Department of English Faculty
Nov. 7, 2023
Eberhard L. Faber Class of 1915 Memorial Lecture in Literature
A Long History of Pandemics
Wai Chee Dimock
Wai Chee Dimock wove a narrative intertwining science, politics, and human communities, beginning with smallpox in the 18th century and extending to the COVID vaccination landscape of our own time, with some discussion of AI along with RFK Jr. Wai Chee Dimock, the William Lampson Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English at Yale University, writes about public health, climate change, and Indigenous communities, focusing on the symbiotic
relation between human and nonhuman intelligence. She is now at Harvard’s Center for the Environment, working on a new book, “AI, Microbes, and Us: Risky Partners in an Age of Pandemics and Climate Change.” A collaborative project, “AI for Climate Resilience,” is co-sponsored by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs.
April 12 and 13, 2024
Troubadours and Sonneteers
A Conference on Global Culture, Performance and the Matter of Display
The continuing presence of lyric in many cultures and media forms proves the endurance of older models of expression and modes of understanding today, with the central feature of the language of lyric poetry, originally and often thereafter as performed song, but also as verse meant for private and silent or collective and shared reading. This conference aimed to provide a common and seminal understanding of a global medieval and Renaissance literature, as the model of
literary scholarship and pedagogy moves away from the single literary traditions associated with particular (especially European) nation states. In this regard, the project openly and enthusiastically embraces lyric and other relevant cultural forms generated in the “global south” and throughout Africa and Asia as well as Europe.
Organized by Nigel Smith, the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature, the conference featured twenty scholars and musical performances on two nights. Papers included “‘Attyr’d Abroad’: Psalms, Poems and Musical Migration” (Isaac Harrison Louth, Department of English), “The Changing Sound of Silence: Persian and Urdu Lyric Poems in Early Modernity” (Jane Mikkelson, Yale University), and “The Global Malay Pantun” (Su Fang Ng, Virginia Tech).
Additional support came from a Humanities Council Special Grant (below); the BainSwiggett Fund, Department of English; Department of Music, and Committee on Renaissance and Early Modern Studies.
Explore more on the conference website
Photos by Gabriel Medina, Department of English
Top: Paul Muldoon and Rogue Oliphant performing. Bottom, from left: Abigail Chapman, soprano and John Lacombe, lute, performing. Bernd Brabec (Institute of Musicology, University of Innsbruck) presenting “The Power of Song: Indigenous Magic and Other Examples on How Words Shape Worlds.”
April 15, 16 and 17, 2024
Princeton Seminar in Poetry and Poetics
James Porter
In the 2024 Princeton Seminar in Poetry and Poetics — “Cosmopoetics: Three Lectures on the Ecologies of Nature, Poetry, and Ethics”
James Porter first took audiences through the philosophies set forth in the fragments of Heraclitus (6/5th centuries BCE) and Empedocles (5th century BCE) that survive in quotations by later ancient authors. In the third lecture, Porter turned to the 20th-century philosopher — and dancer and choreographer — Rachel Bespaloff, fragments of whose final, unfinished project, “The Instant and Freedom” were published in 1949 by her friend Jean Wahl.
Porter is the Irving Stone Chair in Literature and Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
The 2024 Princeton Seminar in Poetry and Poetics was sponsored by the Bain-Swiggett Fund, Department of English, and cosponsored by the Department of Classics.
Intersections Working Group
Organized by Associate Professor of English and African American Studies Kinohi Nishikawa, the Intersections Working Group brings authors of recently published and forthcoming monographs together with Princeton faculty for lunchtime discussions.
Oct. 24, 2023
Sara Marcus, Ph.D. ’18 discussed her book Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (Harvard UP, May 2023) with Diana Fuss, the Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English
Feb. 13, 2024
Maurice Wallace, professor and associate chair of English at Rutgers University-New
James Porter
Brunswick, discussed his book King’s Vibrato: Modernism, Blackness, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr. (Duke UP, Sep. 2022) with Herman Beavers, the Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and currently a departmental guest of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton.
March 28, 2024
Courtney Thorsson, professor of English and Clark Honors College faculty fellow at the University of Oregon, discussed her book The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia UP, Nov. 2023) with Associate Professor of African American Studies and English Autumn Womack
Sep. 21, 2023
17th Annual Humanities Colloquium Archives and the Future
The 2023 colloquium, held on Sep. 21, 2023, launched a celebration of 70 years of the Humanities Council at Princeton University with a wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversation about central issues in research, teaching, and intellectual life.
Associate Professor of English and African American Studies Kinohi Nishikawa presented “Access after the Fact.” Professor of English and American Studies Sarah Rivett presented “The Raven’s Flight through Colonial Archives.” Humanities Council Chair Esther (Starry) Schor, the John J.F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor and Professor of English moderated.
Oct. 9, 2023
Panel Discussion
Ernst Haas Letters & Stories
Eduardo Cadava, the Philip Mayhew Professor of English, convened and moderated a panel, held on Oct. 9, 2023, to celebrate the publication of photographer
and writer Inge Bondi’s intimate account of her close friend and colleague Ernst Haas (1921–86), an early innovator in color photography, whom she first met in Magnum’s New York office in 1951. Bondi shared unique memories alongside reproductions of letters, poems, photographs, and ephemera, and with Princeton University Art Museum Curator of Photography Katherine Bussard and Magnum Foundation President Susan Meiselas, gave historical context to Haas’s emblematic images. Cosponsored with the Princeton University Art Museum.
Nov. 16, 2023
Poetry Reading
The Kingdom of Surfaces
Sally Wen Mao
Professor of English Anne Cheng invited poet Sally Wen Mao for a reading and conversation to celebrate Mao’s new collection
The Kingdom of Surfaces
(Graywolf Press, August 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Prize. The event, moderated by Cheng and hosted by the Program in Asian American Studies, was supported by the Bain-Swiggett Fund, Department of English, and cosponsored by
the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Feb. 15, 2024
Althusser in Yugoslavia: On the Pre-History of the Ljubljana School of Philosophy
Gregor Moder
Visiting Fellow Gregor Moder (University of Ljubljana) discussed the rejection of Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism by the journal Praxis, and the eventual study and appreciation of Althusser’s work in the emerging intellectual milieu of Ljubljana. Organized by Professor of English Andrew Cole
Gregor Moder
Anne Cheng and Sally Wen Mao
Photo by Anze Buh
Feb. 27, 2024
Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture Radiance in Pain and Resilience: The Global Reverberation of Palestinian Historical Trauma
Dr. Samah Jabr
Dr. Samah Jabr, a psychiatrist practicing in the public and the private sectors within Palestine in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, explored the role of cultural identity in preserving wellbeing and navigating the wounds of history, and delved into the psychological dimensions of displacement, dispossession, and cultural distortion, highlighting how Edward Said’s vision of intellectual responsibility offers a framework for psychological resilience and representation in the face of historical trauma.
March 21, 2024
2023-24 Old Dominion Lecture Series Story as Survival
Sarah Rivett
As a 2023-24 Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council, Sarah Rivett, professor of English and American studies, explored the roles and portrayals of the raven in Judeo-Christian, Anglo American, and Indigenous Pacific West origin stories.
May 2, 2024
April 1, 2024
Strange Life Cycle: Works Enter the Public Domain, But How Do They Get There?
Robert Spoo
Highlighting important works that appeared in 1928 — by Claude McKay, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Walt Disney, and others featured in Princeton Special Collections’ curated selection — Robert Spoo, the Leonard L. Milberg ‘53 Professor in Irish Letters, showed that copyright’s life cycle has been anything but a predictable journey for many works.
April 3, 2024
Re-Orient-ation: Gender Transformation within Oriental Contexts
Demet Karabulut Dede
Visiting Fellow Demet Karabulut Dede delivered a comparative reading of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and Vita Sackville-West’s Challenge, elucidating the theme of gender transformation and the metaphorical “unveiling” as it unfolds within the context of the Orient.
Arts in the Invisible City: Race, Policy, Performance
Presentations by students from HUM352 / ENG252 / URB352 / THR360
Students showed work they created, along with community members, as part of multimedia artist and activist Bentrice Jusu’s The Potential Project, which uses storytelling, visual art, photography and digital media to acknowledge the stories and lives of those we have lost to violence, and to imagine our community healing. With Professor of English D. Vance Smith and Lecturer in The Council of the Humanities Nyssa Chow
2023–24 Magic Grants
Postwar New York: Workshops
Joshua Kotin, Associate Professor of English
This grant supported three public lectures and an oral history to enhance the spring 2024 graduate seminar “Postwar New York,” taught by Joshua Kotin. The lectures connected students to mid-career scholars and extended discussions beyond the classroom to offer a more comprehensive account of the artistic, literary, and intellectual culture in 1960s New
Above: Sarah Rivett discusses representations of Raven in Tlingit art.
York. Read about the events in detail in the close-up at the end of this section.
Theater in Early Modern London: The Purpose of Playing
Bailey Sincox, Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities, English and Humanistic Studies
This grant enriched a new, interdisciplinary 400-level seminar in fall 2023, which provided a comprehensive, performance-centered introduction to English drama’s golden age (circa 1570-1640). Students traveled to the United Kingdom to experience first-hand theatrical spaces that they studied in class, including the recreated Globe, Whitehall’s Banqueting House, the British Library, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
2023–24
Global Initiatives
International Network for Comparative Humanities
Maria DiBattista, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature
This initiative supports a working group of literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic dedicated to promoting the comparative study of humanities. The ongoing grant will support the further consolidation and expansion of
INCH, including a members-only INCH event on Princeton’s campus in January 2025.
2023–24
Special Grants
Troubadours and Sonneteers: Global Culture, Performance and the Matter of Display
Nigel Smith, William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature
The Edward T. Cone Fund in the Humanities Council supported this two-day conference in spring 2024, held on campus and concluding with a concert in the Robert L. Solley Theater in the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts. See item above in “Special Events.”
Ongoing Projects
Humanities + Data Science Summer Institute
Meredith Martin, Associate Professor of English and Director, Center for Digital Humanities
The Humanities + Data Science Summer Institute, run by the Center for Digital Humanities, empowers scholars from the humanities and humanities-adjacent social
sciences to engage with the conceptual, practical, and ethical aspects of data science.
Land, Language, and Art (LLA)
Sarah Rivett, Professor of English and American Studies, with Simon Morrison (Music, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Fund for Canadian Studies); Bryan Just (Art & Archaeology); Laura Kalin (Linguistics, Humanities Council); Tessa Desmond (Princeton School of Public and International Affairs); Daniel Rubenstein, Emeritus (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)
This three-year project, from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton, supports initiatives to foster new methodologies and modes of knowledge production in three areas of research and learning that are central to Indigenous studies: land, language, and art.
Projects supported during 2023-24 included a weeklong visit to Princeton by playwright and choreographer Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation) as a Short-Term Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council and Lewis Center. FastHorse and her creative partner, director Michael John Garcés, held a public conversation on their ten-year exploration of contemporary indigeneity through theater. Workshops and conversations with Native students and theater faculty were scheduled throughout the week.
Photo by Brandon Le, Lewis Center for the Arts
Larissa FastHorse and Michael John Garcés in conversation at the Lewis Center
Postwar New York and Beyond
A spring 2024 lecture series organized by Joshua Kotin
Sarah Malone / Department of
English
From ‘The Hot Center’ to the Logline
In a public lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 20, Laura B. McGrath took an audience of Princeton students and faculty through a half-century of literary agents changing the landscape of American literary publishing.
McGrath, an assistant professor of English at Temple University, drew her talk title, “‘The Hot Center’: The Literary Establishment, circa 1963,” from “the red hot center,” the term for agents in a “chart of power” — more a lava lamp than a chart, she said, bringing it onscreen — compiled by L. Rust Hills and published in Esquire in 1963 as “The Structure of the American Literary Establishment.” Other “centers” in the structure include “the cool world,” “the drama situation,” “ivory tower,” “little magazines,” “commercial magazines,” and “squaresville.”
From 1963, McGrath stepped through the next years with stops at chapters from her book in progress, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of Contemporary American Literature , tracing agent Candida Donadio discovering Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, among many noted writers, rising to great influence, and falling into obscurity since her death, relative to editors such as Robert Gottlieb or Gordon Lish.
McGrath described the statistical analysis and ethnographic research, including interviews and surveys, that have gone into her work capturing agents’ influence on both the business of literature and the literature created. The notion of a debut novel — in discussion after the talk, McGrath and Professor of English Jeff Nunokawa noted the descent from debutante — is the creation of a publishing world with agents and authors, bid up to seven figure advances for first books, as two members of a troika with editors.
McGrath diagramed and close read the Publishers Weekly item for Zakiya Dalilia Harri’s The Other Black Girl Faculty in the audience enthusiastically joined in the analysis, admiring the craft of the announcement, the mention of the novel being “pitched as Younger meets Get Out, with a dash of Such a Fun Age.”
Middlemen is under contract with Princeton University Press and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. McGrath’s editor from the press was among the audience.
Laura B. McGrath and her diagram of the Publishers Weekly item for Zakiya Dalilia Harri’s The Other Black Girl.
Confronting the Late Emancipation Novel
Who “gets” — who has a right, who has a responsibility — to write on topics of great importance to a particular group? What, in each particular case, is an appropriate approach? What audience is imagined? Appropriate, after all, is a judgment that rests with an audience. Who is in a position to judge, and for their judgment to have sway?
Such questions ran through “Nat Turner and the Late Emancipation Novel,” the March 5 public lecture by Christopher Freeburg, the Presidential Humanities and Social Sciences Endowed Chair and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, drawn from Freedom Acts, a book in-progress that reimagines the problem of objectification in seminal works of African American literature. Freeburg interwove discussion of the text of William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner with discussion of its reception, from initial lauding by the largely white literary establishment — culminating in the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the largest fee for film rights at that time — to responses in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, edited by John Henrik Clarke, and successful efforts by Ossie Davis and other Black actors in Hollywood to prevent the film’s production.
In his lecture, Freeburg focused line-level attention on certain passages, reading aloud Turner describing wonder at touching male skin, in language Freeburg characterized as approaching religious fervor. Freeburg later shared Black writers’ and critics’ contention that the fault in Styron’s novel wasn’t so much its controversial subject matter but its overwrought style. For them, Styron showed no aptitude for listening to how Black people actually speak and thus fell short in representing a Black first-person voice. Freeburg offered Margaret Walker’s novel Jubilee (1966) as a contrast to Confessions, and in so doing, observed how the vast publicity bestowed on Styron by the publishing establishment curtailed early attention for Walker’s novel, which only belatedly earned recognition as a groundbreaking work.
From left, professors Josh Kotin, Christopher Freeburg, and Autumn Womack. Freeburg is delivering his lecture “Nat Turner and the Late Emancipation Novel.”
The students, faculty and staff attending the lecture engaged with the range of issues Freeburg raised. Taking up his observation that Styron had endeavored to humanize Turner, a graduate student considered whether humanism as such reached a conceptual limit point in the brutal facts of enslavement, much less a white writer’s efforts to represent them. Associate Professor of African American Studies and English Autumn Womack, noting that she was fresh from studying books on craft, suggested that the requirements of a novel — creating a character to enact a story through motivations — can conflict with the requirements of a historical subject to stay true to the facts. Following on Womack’s remarks, an MFA graduate noted that the discussion in progress would have been unlikely in many creative writing workshops, with their longtime emphasis on the sentence, and on substance happening from it. Audience members contrasted the complications of relying so closely on historical events with Toni Morrison’s creative license in using folk and mystical elements. Interest outran the time booked. Associate Professor of English and African American Studies Kinohi Nishikawa wrapped up the discussion by reflecting that Confessions, while its issues make it perhaps difficult to get through, merits reading especially in dialogue with James Baldwin’s novel Another Country (1962), for the kind of conversation about representation that the group was having.
Small Presses and Little Magazines in New York in the 1970s
For the third of its four spring semester talks, the lecture series Postwar New York and Beyond visited the Department of Special Collections in Firestone Library to view publications, correspondence and other items in the Johnny Stanton Collection of Siamese Banana Press Records, and to listen to an oral history by writer, editor, and publisher Johnny Stanton and poet, editor, teacher and guest lecturer Elinor Nauen.
Siamese Banana Press started as a newspaper in 1972 and ended, in Stanton’s phrase, “as a performance gang” in 1978.
In running the press, Stanton and Nauen invited and engaged in experiments in form and medium — collage, mimeographs, mixed media; every possibility was to be tried. They embraced the ephemeral and the moment. Irreverent invention by poets and writers of the New York School — some of whom were published for the first time in Siamese Banana Press — figures prominently in the holdings of Princeton University Library Special Collections.
Left top: Students in the graduate seminar “Postwar New York,” along with faculty, staff, and members of the public view items in the Johnny Stanton Collection of Siamese Banana Press Records.
Left: Self-Portrait. Joe Brainard with Anne Waldman. Johnny Stanton Collection of Siamese Banana Press Records, C1727, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Beyond New York
Postwar New York and Beyond concluded with a far-ranging look abroad and from abroad with University of Oxford Associate Professor of English Malachi McIntosh’s talk “The Caribbean Artists Movement: New Perspectives.”
McIntosh wove a narrative from soon after the 1948 arrival in the United Kingdom of the EmpireWindrush, through the 1966-72 Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), CAM’s influence, and writers and landmark moments into the 1980s and 1990s and after
CAM was founded with twin desires, McIntosh said: to get in touch with other writers, and to address the position of Black writers in England. There had been no such entity as “Black Britain” in the 1950s, he noted; it was a “new state of being.” The status of Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies, created in 1949, had granted colonial subjects free movement through the Commonwealth (until 1962), and artists and writers benefitted to a degree early on from interest in the “exoticism” of colonial countries, but by the mid-1960s, as they became more vocal about politics, popular and critical interest in their work waned.
Viewed from Britain and the Commonwealth, the concurrent United States civil rights movement accorded America a sense of individual possibility that McIntosh evoked with writer George Lamming’s recollection of his imagined America as “a kingdom next door to the sky” (The Pleasures of Exile, 1960). But for CAM members, McIntosh said, with closer acquaintance came a fuller realization that the United States was but one case, and the Black Power ethos of absolute commitment to heroic struggle came to be seen as particular to the American situation.
CAM hosted conferences in 1967 and 1969. Into the 1970s, Stuart Hall, Aubrey Williams and other CAM members achieved wider notice in their fields and in popular media. In Britain in the 1980s and after, Blackness came to be seen as a capacious category, McIntosh said, with writers, artists and musicians born in Britain or hailing from diverse societies in nations that had been independent for several generations. Black Britishness is a concept still evolving as it is lived and figures in creative and scholarly work.
In Q&A following the lecture, English department Chair Simon Gikandi, the Class of 1943 University Professor of English, added context about CAM co-founder Andrew Salkey, and expanded the account of Black Power in the United States. Associate Professor Josh Kotin asked about the connection between the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in New York in 1965 and the rise of CAM a year later, particularly what influence Calvin Hernton, who moved from New York to London in the fall of 1965, might have had. Kotin invited McIntosh to speculate about the mid-1970s end of CAM, noting that BAM ended around the same time, and asked could the end of both movements be related to their success in influencing academia?
Postwar New York and Beyond is a Humanities Council Magic Project with support from the Bain-Swiggett Fund, the Department of English; the Center for Digital Humanities; and Princeton University Library Special Collections.
University of Oxford Associate Professor of English Malachi McIntosh
The Next Chapter: Alumni Interview
Jasmine Wang, A. B. ’18
Head of Academics, Test Prep & College Counseling; Ivy League Prep
How did your study at Princeton English prepare and/or help you in the work you do now?
Studying English at Princeton was indulgent and necessary. The experience taught me to feel more pleasure in asking the question, to cultivate a little more faith in the spaces between. It taught me that the pursuit of beauty is not insignificant or frivolous, though beauty exists in seemingly mundane things. I was continuously invited into an open ending, where there wasn’t a right or a wrong.
I’m an artist and educator now. I recently founded my own test prep and college counseling company, where my pedagogical values stem directly from the McCosh conversations I had with my professors throughout my time there. I find myself in session with my students encouraging them to do the very things I was nurtured to do: if you feel confusion, can you dwell just long enough to phrase that confusion into a question? Are you willing to experiment and suspend the attachment to getting things right? In standardized test prep — a space literally defined by numbers — and college counseling, I try to consciously create space for the humanity of my students, for their unique learning process and the surprising discoveries we might make along the way. When I audition for stage, film, and television roles, and the old familiar twinge of perfectionism begins to leer nearby, I can be reminded that asking the questions may be more fruitful, freeing and expansive than any “right” answer I could give.
What advice would you give yourself today if you were just starting at Princeton?
Stay with yourself. Go out and try it all! And most important: trust your instincts. Take time to observe and reflect with yourself on where you feel most nourished and whole. And go get more of that. As a freshman, the possibilities truly seem endless.
What about Princeton do you feel most nostalgic for?
Walking. The beautiful campus. I’m a New Yorker now. The green spaces are few and far between. And late meal. Who doesn’t love late meal?
What’s the most interesting book, article, film or other English major-y text you’ve come across recently?
The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul. As someone who lived so much in the mind, I felt liberated reading this book and learning about all the ways learning itself is not “brain-bound,” but rather a physical experience. Our bodies are incredibly intelligent and actively influence our thinking patterns. Connecting to our gut, allowing ourselves to learn through gesture, movement, in small groups, in nature, and even in supportive architectural design can move you forward more than you think.
What turning-point, choice or decision in your life after Princeton has been most unexpected?
Becoming an actor. I never thought of living a creative life or leading a creative career beyond, let’s say, academia. I got my first job on television last year, in the pilot episode of Elsbeth on CBS. I discovered the Alexander Technique, which has brought me into my body and into process in new ways. I am now training in New York City for my teacher certification. I fantasize about law school sometimes. Stay tuned.
The colloquia that English doctoral candidates organize in their second year at Princeton span a wide spectrum of literary fields, eras, genres, geographies, and critical approaches.
Theory Colloquium co-chairs Eliana Rozinov and Paola Del Toro stand with David Eng before Eng’s Feb. 7, 2024 presentation of “Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America.” Eng is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Department of English Graduate Colloquia
Americanist Colloquium
Nov. 8, 2023
Death and Dying in Diaspora
Allan Punzalan Isaac
Professor of American Studies and English; Associate Dean of the Humanities, Rutgers University
Nov. 30, 2023
Strange Life: Science Fiction and the Ecology of Decolonization
Priscilla Wald
R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University
Contemporary Poetry and Romanticists Colloquium
Nov. 15, 2023
The Poetics of Reading: In Conversation with Maureen N. McLane and Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Maureen McLane
Professor of English, NYU
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Distinguished Professor of English, Stony Brook University
Contemporary Poetry Colloquium
Feb 29, 2024
Occult Poetics
CAConrad
Poet, Writer; Creative Writing Instructor, Columbia University, Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam
Hoa Nguyen
Poet, Speaker, Educator
Contemporary Poetry and Postcolonial Colloquium
March 1, 2024
A Poetics of Postmourning: Elegy and the Caribbean
Jahan Ramazani
University Professor, Edgar F. Shannon
Professor of English, University of Virginia
Ecotheories
Colloquium
Feb. 5, 2024
Dams that Save: Law, Beavers, and the Making of the Yukon River
Bathsheba Demuth
Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society, Brown University
March 20, 2024
Black Star: Charles HérardDumesle’s Haitian Naturalism
Monique Allewaert
Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
18th C./Romantic Studies
Colloquium
Oct. 5, 2023
Wonder: Literature and Science in the Long Eighteenth Century
Tita Chico
Director, Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, English; Professor of English, University of Maryland
Postcolonial Colloquium
April 10, 2024
Feminist Soap Box:
A Reading & Conversation with Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Novelist, Climate Justice Organizer
Renaissance Colloquium
Nov. 14, 2023
“The Roaring Girl”: In Search of a “Playable Cut”
Sawyer Kemp
Assistant Professor of English, Queens College
Feb. 29, 2024
Herbert the Outsider
Molly Murray
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
April 9, 2024
How Poetry Thinks: Abstraction and Phenomenality in the Lyrics of Thomas Traherne
Timothy Harrison
Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago
April 23, 2024
A Second Stride: Recalculating the Theatrical Sublime in Bernini, Molière, and Calderón
William N. West
Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University
Theory Colloquium
Feb. 7, 2024
Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America
David L. Eng
Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
April 4, 2024
Sheltering in Style
Sunny Xiang
Assistant Professor of English, Affiliate Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University
Victorian Colloquium
Nov. 1, 2023
History (Re)incarnate: George Eliot and Qurratulain Hyder
Maha Jafri
Assistant Professor of English, The University of the South
Feb. 28, 2024
Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis
Jennifer Brody
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University
The Next Chapter: Alumni Interview
Joani Etskovitz, A. B. ’17
Ph.D. candidate in English, Harvard University
How did your study at Princeton English prepare and/or help you in the work you do now?
I’m in the final year of my Ph.D. in English at Harvard, and in all my teaching and departmental service work, I’ve applied the approach to mentorship that I learned at Princeton English. My undergraduate professors all took the time to learn about my interests outside of class and guide me to develop related research projects. Susan Wolfson, for example, encouraged me to use my junior paper to consider a question from my summer internship at the Library of Congress Young Readers Center: what, exactly, drew so many story-time students to the same few scenes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? The following summer on the Bread Loaf fellowship, Nigel Smith emphasized my work at the LOC when describing my thesis research to Bodleian’s Head of Rare Books, with whom (no coincidence) I went on to curate an exhibit the following year. This mentorship gave me the confidence to explore the practical applications and career paths born of my research in English. Now, I’m working to share this confidence with my students and peers through Harvard’s Literary Careers Program, which I co-founded to provide humanities students with alumni mentors, internship opportunities, and professional development funding. After graduating, I hope to continue this mode of mentorship as university faculty.
What advice would you give yourself today if you were just starting at Princeton? I’d offer some advice that I didn’t receive until the end of my first semester, when I accidentally broke into the Cotsen Library’s curatorial offices: be open to long-term opportunities that may seem like distractions from immediate goals. In my first semester, I’d cut down on my extracurricular activities to get the hang of Princeton courses. By Dean’s Date, I felt lonely, even though I had more friends than ever, thanks to the Glee Club and Hum. I didn’t realize what was missing until an afternoon in exam period, when my studies in Firestone were interrupted by gaggle of children noisily leaving Cotsen. Without thinking, I walked past them, entered the office doors, and nearly collided with a surprised Dana Sheridan. In reply to my sudden, unpolished request to volunteer in any library teaching programs — one of my favorite activities in high school — Dana offered me a paid yet time-consuming job, which I tried to refuse out of concern for my coursework. Her advice, to look beyond my immediate aims when considering chances to do what I love, has supported my professional and personal flourishing ever since.
What about Princeton do you feel most nostalgic for?
I miss my morning walks to Small World! After one chaotic, failed search for breakfast at eight on a Saturday, I made a habit of heading into town, through the surreal peace of a campus that felt more the grounds of an abandoned museum than a school.
What’s the most interesting book, article, film or other English major-y text you’ve come across recently?
Recently, most of my reading has been for my dissertation on “The Feminist Adventure Novel,” which identifies and details the history of a previously uncatalogued genre of fiction for adolescents, originally based in Eastern texts (1700-1930). Part of the fun of this project has been puzzling through early, hybrid experiments in this subgenre, which nests stories within layers of frame-tale fictions. So, when Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe came out, I had to take a break and spend some time with the story within her story, Paradoxical Undressing, a book that transforms into a new text every time a fictional character picks it up, and demands careful rereading.
What turning-point, choice or decision in your life after Princeton has been most unexpected?
When I decided to invite a friend to join me for an afternoon of research at the Bodleian, I thought we’d just be writing our term papers. We’re now married, and we’re still writing.
Our Intellectual Community
Humanities Council Visiting Fellows
Frances Ferguson
Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of English
Mabel Greene Myers Distinguished Service Professor of English and the College at the University of Chicago, Emeritus
Frances Ferguson served as the Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of English. She taught the spring 2024 course “Special Studies in the 18th Century: Psalms, Congregational Hymns, Criticism.” She delivered a public lecture, “Persuasion: Oratory and the Novel,” on March 18, 2024. She is the author of
Wordsworth: Language as Counter-spirit (Yale University Press, 1977), Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (Routledge, 1992), and Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). She is currently completing a study on the rise of mass education (around 1800). Recent essays center on Bitcoin (published) and on 18th-century oratory and the English novel (forthcoming).
Special Studies in the 18th Century: Psalms, Congregational Hymns, Criticism ENG 545
This course focuses on the texts that were the most widely circulated literary forms of the 18th century, the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible, and their adaptation in the 18th century into congregational hymns (hymns meant to be sung by an entire congregation and not just by choristers or soloists). We read hymns by Isaac Watts, John Newton, William Cowper, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, and look at some contemporary criticism (by Robert Lowth and Joseph Priestley) to think about how the diffusion of Psalm-based hymns across large groups intersected with and contributed to the development of literary criticism.
R. Darren Gobert
Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of English
William and Sue Gross Professor of Theater Studies and English, Duke University
R. Darren Gobert delivered a public lecture, “The Histories of Catharsis,” on Feb. 21, 2024, and led a lunchtime workshop for graduate students, “Methodologies for Literary Study,” on Feb. 22, 2024.
Gobert serves as chair of theater studies at Duke, where he specializes in comparative modern and contemporary Western drama, dramatic and performance theory, and the philosophy of theatre. His publications include The Theatre of Caryl Churchill (Bloomsbury) and The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater (Stanford UP), which won awards for best book in the field of theater history from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and the American Society for Theatre Research. His other honors include a Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching and the President’s University-Wide Teaching Award from York University. From 2015 to 2020, he was editor of the journal Modern Drama.
Robert Sullivan
Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of English
Author Robert Sullivan delivered a public lecture, “Double Exposure: Re-Seeing the West with Timothy O’Sullivan, America’s Most Mysterious War Photographer,” on Sep.
26, 2023, and led a lunchtime seminar, “Where Is Princeton?,” on Sep. 27, 2023, and “Walking in Place,” a walking tour of Princeton and vicinity on Sep. 28, 2023.
Robert Sullivan is the author of numerous books, including Rats, The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, The Thoreau You Don’t Know and My American Revolution. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, A Public Space and Vogue. He is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and teaches creative writing at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. In April 2024, FSG published his latest book, Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O’Sullivan, America’s Most Mysterious War Photographer.
John Durham Peters
Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of English
María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies, Yale University
John Durham Peters delivered a public lecture, “Notes Toward the Media History of Gibberish,” on Sep. 20, 2023, and led a lunchtime seminar, “Circumstantial Detail,” on Sep. 19, 2023. While at Princeton, he also participated in a Center for Digital Humanities conversation with Shannon Mattern, the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and Art History, University of Pennsylvania.
John Durham Peters teaches and writes on media history and philosophy. He is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. He taught at the University of Iowa between 19862016. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition, and most recently, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.
“The promise of gibberish […] is not to invoke that ne connaissance of pretending like our language is nature and we didn’t have to go through this eruption into language that we all had to do from gibberish into intelligibility.”
John Durham Peters
Watch John Durham Peters’s lecture.
Teaching and Learning
Letter from the Director of Undergraduate Studies
Russ Leo / Associate Professor of English
The department had much to celebrate on Class Day at the end of May 2024. Our graduating seniors wrote exciting and ambitious theses, many of which received awards and recognition in and beyond the department, and with ample support from both faculty and alumni, many students were afforded internship experience and research opportunities. Four majors were awarded the A. Scott Berg Fellowship (a scholarship endowed by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg ’71) to support their creative research enterprises (there were two winners and two runners-up). And three members of the Class of 2025 were awarded summer fellowships to attend the Bread Loaf School of English at Oxford where, under the supervision of professor Josh Kotin, they began research on their senior theses. Our faculty continue to develop and teach new courses and innovative ways of presenting classic works and critical debates and to take advantage of the Collaborative Teaching Initiative in the Humanities and Social Sciences, through which professors and graduate students teach undergraduate courses together — a wonderful way to integrate faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students across the department.
Across AY 2023-24, the members of the Committee on Departmental Studies (CDS) focused on implementing the new oral comprehensive exam and to meeting the demands of our new English minor (available to the Class of 2025 and beyond). While the exam format debuted in May 2023, students were still excited to be among the first majors to experience the new format. Faculty administered individual oral exams on Wednesday, May 8; when our senior majors picked up their theses and comments that afternoon, many stayed to celebrate their achievements with professors over tea and dessert. A word on the new exam: designed and administered for the first time in AY2022-23, the new senior departmental exam is a 30-minute discussion between the student and two examiners about their independent work as well as their coursework. It is intended to be a cumulative discussion, giving students the opportunity to demonstrate knowledge of the curriculum as well as to relate the texts and ideas that they encountered in their classes to their independent work. During this time, students are asked to think carefully and critically about their journey through the major — relating particular texts or archives they encountered in coursework to their thesis, for instance, or situating their own research alongside current work in the relevant field. The exam is at once an exercise in reflection and critical acumen.
CDS also spent the year overhauling junior advising in the department, with an eye to redesigning ENG 300 (the junior seminar, or JRS, which every major is required to take in the fall of their junior year). This is a particularly important task considering that ENG 300 is perhaps the keystone of our curriculum — the one course that all majors take, and a vital introduction to the discipline of English, to the faculty, and to the various paths one can take towards a compelling thesis. Overwhelmingly, students choose to major in English because of our commitment to careful advising and our ample support for independent work. This all begins with ENG 300.
In recent years, students were assigned a single adviser, one who taught the JRS in the fall and who continued to shepherd their independent work in the spring. After a year of discussion with students and faculty, the
department decided that, beginning in fall 2024, students will be assigned a new adviser mid-year. Our majors will thus benefit from more advisers and diverse perspectives; even in their junior year, they will become familiar with more faculty members — possible mentors and recommenders — as they develop their independent work. In each fall section of ENG 300, students will complete focused writing exercises that introduce library resources and acquaint them with key aspects of research, writing, and criticism in the discipline. Each fall, students will also develop a writing schedule as well as research and writing habits by means of weekly precis/ reflections and in-class writing assignments. The goal, by the end of each fall semester, is to prepare each junior major to spend the following four months working on an independent research project, the JP, to say nothing of their theses the following year.
CDS will devote the next two semesters to fine-tuning the new ENG 300, which will go into effect in fall 2025. With support from the 250th Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education and the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, I designed a new version of ENG 300. This is the model that CDS will develop before workshopping it with other faculty members. The redesigned version of this methods course will include new assignments, guidelines, and assessment tools that better prepare junior English majors for their independent work. In conjunction with these changes, the guidelines and assessment procedures for the junior paper will be revised with the goal of bringing consistency and transparency to each phase of a student’s independent work within the department. Each JRS will serve as a thorough introduction to methods in English, an accessible introduction to research and writing in the discipline. Each JRS will offer the same guidelines, make expectations for student work clear, and afford students resources for the JP.
Over the course of the year, our majors remained active in the life of the department. So too did a host of graduate students who serve as outreach coordinators for the undergraduate program, hosting a number of thesis and JP boot camp sessions as well as several meetings preparing senior majors for the exam. Moreover, guided by the Undergraduate Advisory Council, we hosted the annual Majors’ Colloquium “What’s the Point?” in March 2024 — the topic: our majors challenged several faculty members (Jill Dolan, Rob Nixon, Jeff Nunokawa, and Autumn Womack) to respond to the following prompt:
What’s the point of an English degree? Of language and literature? Of life itself? With some people catastrophizing that the humanities are in danger and the world itself in a volatile state, it’s not uncommon to feel a bit existential. We know these are difficult, maybe unsolvable questions, but we’d love for the speakers to help us begin to answer them at our upcoming English Majors Colloquium.
The responses were thoughtful and inspiring. Overall, the event was a great success, renewing many a commitment to English and to the humanities at large.
And we were fortunate to welcome our new undergraduate administrator, Lauren Romano, to the department! Romano worked indefatigably to make this year a success, especially as we adapted to the new exam format and the arrival of our first minors. Romano is a wonderful colleague and a brilliant addition to the department, bringing great experience and acumen to the undergraduate program. It has been a great joy to work with her these past months and I look forward to the coming year!
Letter from the Director of Graduate Studies
Joshua Kotin / Associate Professor of English
As this annual report demonstrates, the academic year had many highlights. After all the changes to the graduate program last year — a new program administrator, a new handbook, a new admissions process — we were able to begin the fall by focusing on the basics: welcoming students, supporting research, and creating opportunities for collaboration and community. The department offered a full and diverse slate of graduate seminars, and graduate students hosted scholars and writers from around the world in a series of well-attended colloquia. John Lacombe coordinated all this activity flawlessly, serving as a wise and reliable resource in McCosh Hall.
Most deserving of celebration are the graduate students themselves. Three won major awards from the University: Denise Xu received a Procter Fellowship, and Diana Little and Pasquale Toscano received teaching awards. Eight — yes eight! — students (now alumni) will be starting new assistant professor positions in the fall: Lindsay Griffiths Brown at Lafayette College, Brandi Bushman at Brown University, rl Goldberg at Hampshire College, Annabelle Haynes at Hofstra University, Becca Liu at Brown, Isabel Lockhart at New York University, Jason Molesky at Saint Louis University, and Pasquale Toscano at Vassar College. (Brandi will begin as a postdoctoral fellow at Brown and then transition into an assistant professor position.) Three students will start postdoctoral fellowships: Michael Harrington at New York University, Fedor Karmanov at Princeton, and Lisa Kraege at Brown University. And two will start visiting positions: Promise Li at Caltech and Jeewon Yoo at Williams College. The flurry of final public oral examinations in the spring was an occasion to learn about pathbreaking research, engage in vibrant debate, and reaffirm the department’s commitment to graduate teaching and collective inquiry.
Amid all these achievements, the graduate program faced one significant challenge. Two students from the department were arrested during the pro-Palestinian protests at Clio Hall. The University supported the criminal proceedings and issued eviction orders, forcing one student from her home on campus. (The other student lived off-campus.) The University’s actions led to a general sense of insecurity and distrust, especially for students living in graduate student housing. The University eventually reversed the eviction orders, but continued with most of the other actions. The department is now refocused on supporting our students and their research, and rebuilding community.
The Next Chapter: Alumni Interview
Liora Selinger, Ph.D. ’22
Lecturer, Princeton Writing Program
How did your study at Princeton English prepare and/or help you in the work you do now?
I teach a writing seminar on Curiosity in Princeton’s Writing Program. Everything I studied about children’s questions and experiments in education in British Romantic literature infuses that course. So do tactics gleaned from all that I learned about research, writing, and revision from my own trials, tribulations, and triumphs of dissertation-writing. My writer’s block and revision woes have inspired many a lesson plan by now!
When I teach, I invoke my mentors from the English Department all the time — Bill Gleason for his generous, inspiring teaching; Susan Wolfson for her ways of cultivating unparalleled attentiveness and precise writing in her students; Starry Schor for her endlessly generative questions; Meredith Martin for meeting students where they are with support both intellectual and emotional; and Claudia Johnson for bringing joy into the writing process and nurturing the craft of the sentence.
I’d add that the close attention, noticing, and synthesizing and articulating ideas that I practiced in depth studying English are ways of thinking and communicating that enrich every one of my days and interactions — even in parts of my life that have nothing to do with literature at all.
What advice would you give yourself today if you were just starting at Princeton?
Enjoy the conversations! At the beginning of grad school, I wasn’t sure I belonged — I felt excited and awed but also quite intimidated and shy! Looking back, however, each conversation I had opened my mind, and, little by little, made me fully part of a community that was one of the most enriching I’ve been in. There are amazing friendships that uniquely emerge when working with others in intensive multi-year literary study. Some of the most interesting, ambitious, creative people you’ll ever meet are here and now is this rare moment in time when you’re all together doing strange things like tracking the “career of a word” and reading Marx’s Capital, Rousseau’s Confessions, and Keston Sutherland’s Odes to TL61P in rotation late at night in a Nassau Street Starbucks.
What do you feel most nostalgic for about Princeton?
Susan Wolfson’s office! It feels like a cozy little home and yet with all the collaborative, generative work of an “office.” It was a total refuge, and some of the most interesting conversations happened around her table. The McCosh basement held some good talks, too, but I’d say that the warmly-lit, treasure-filled little museum/temple to British Romantic literature that is Susan’s office wins.
What’s the most interesting book, article, film or other English major-y text you’ve come across recently?
Aftersun is a film by Charlotte Wells that one of my students introduced me to. It gives a stunning portrayal of a child’s perspective, a child’s ways of knowing, and the power and limits of memory — all qualities of childhood experience that I studied in 18th- and 19th-century literature taken in a new medium — and, like the best texts, most of the meaning is not in what’s being told but in how it’s being told.
What turning-point, choice or decision in your life after Princeton has been most unexpected?
I can’t say I ever expected to teach courses about Mars exploration with a Ph.D. in English! And yet, my writing seminar on Curiosity is multi-disciplinary and draws in students from a range of intended majors from astrophysics to engineering to biology and chemistry, who are learning to develop research and writing skills relevant to STEM fields. For that reason, teaching a unit of my course on uncertainty, inquiry, and discovery in NASA’s Curiosity Rover mission has been an unexpected outcome of my studies of 18th- and 19th-century British literature. As Meredith Martin said, when encouraging me to make tough choices to narrow my scope in my dissertation, “everything connects to everything!” Thanks to those wise words, I appropriately found focus for that project, and, in turn, managed to complete it — but I’m also happy now to make some wildly expansive connections in my teaching these days.
Kraege, Michael Harrington, Isabel Lockhart) courtesy of the alumni.
Assistant Professor of English, Lafayette College
Brandi Bushman
Mellon Postdoctoral Research
Associate in American Studies
Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brown University
rL Goldberg
Assistant Professor of Queer Studies, Hampshire College
Michael Harrington
Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in English, New York University
Annabelle Haynes
Assistant Professor of English, Hofstra University
Fedor Karmanov
Postgraduate Research Associate in English, Princeton University
Lisa Kraege
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Classics, Brown University
Promise Li
Lecturer in English, Caltech
Rebecca Liu
Assistant Professor of English, Brown University
Isabel (Izzy) Lockhart
Assistant Professor of English, New York University
Jason Molesky
Assistant Professor of English, Saint Louis University
Pasquale Toscano
Instructor in English, Vassar College
Jeewon Yoo
Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Williams College
If I could give first-year Lindsay any advice it would be to never prioritize your work over your well-being. Graduate school can feel so all-important and so immediate, but it’s important to remember that you’ve got to be well enough to make it through. Some days I wish I’d rested more, slept more, took more walks, or said “no” when I knew I was overcommitted
I’m most nostalgic for my first and second years — the coursework years. It was a pre-pandemic universe and I made so many friends so quickly, attended some evening talk or event every other day, and drank so much free Princeton wine! I just have so many sweet memories of feeling in community and excited about the new chapter ahead of me
I really enjoyed reading Hell of a Book by Jason Mott recently! Somehow both heartbreaking and funny
With immense gratitude teachers in the English department; being part of this communit y has been such a privilege.
rL Goldberg
New Directions in Teaching
Co-taught through the Collaborative Teaching Initiative
Through the Office of the Dean of the College, graduate students in the humanities and social sciences who have successfully completed their general examination and who have already demonstrated excellence in teaching as an AI in a previous semester may apply to participate in an initiative that allows them to co-design and co-teach an undergraduate course at Princeton with a faculty mentor.
Eduardo Cadava and Anthie Georgiadi
Literatures of the American Renaissance, 1820-1865
ENG 334
This course surveys literature from one of the most exhilarating and fraught periods in American history. Reading texts by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Fuller, Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs-and putting them in relation to political speeches, antislavery tracts, ecological materials, and Indigenous texts, it explores the way in which these writers engage contemporary issues such as revolution, slavery, nationalism, agriculture, westward expansion, women’s rights, democracy, and war, and in doing so, can become resources for doing political work in the present and, in particular, anti-racist work.
Nigel Smith and Pasquale Toscano
Bodies & Belonging in Milton’s Epic Tradition
ENG 359
Epic poetry is like a blockbuster film (with war, sex, downfall, exaltation) and was considered “the best and most accomplished kind of poetry” in the Renaissance. Four-hundred years later, its greatest practitioners are rarely read. Our course aims to compensate for this neglect by immersing students in the greatest eddies of epic activity from two interrelated vantage points. First, Milton’s Paradise Lost, that culmination of the entire (neo)classical
epic tradition. And second, disability studies, which interrogates how certain physical and mental features (often coded as deviations from the able-bodied norm) become stigmatized.
Autumn Womack and Lindsay Brown Topics in Women’s Writing: Archival Silence & Aesthetic Innovation
ENG 383
In this course, students will think dynamically about the relationship between archival records of Black life and Black women’s creative expression to interrogate the possibilities and the limits of historical archives. Through handson engagement with archival objects in special collections and deep readings of literature, poetry, and visual arts, we will explore what the archival record affords, erases, and silences, and, conversely, how imaginative practices can begin to address and redress its subjects and their histories.
Russ Leo and Madison Wolfert Topics in Gender and Sexuality Studies: Gender, Sex, and Desire in Early Modernity
ENG 384
In this course, students will think dynamically about the relationship between archival records of Black life and Black women’s creative expression to interrogate the possibilities and the limits of historical archives. Through handson engagement with archival objects in special collections and deep readings of literature, poetry, and visual arts, we will explore what the archival record affords, erases, and silences, and, conversely, how imaginative practices can begin to address and redress its subjects and their histories.
Study Abroad
Bread Loaf Summer at Oxford
In collaboration with the Bread Loaf School of English, the English department offers a sixweek program of study at Lincoln College, Oxford University, for rising seniors. Students take a course from an Oxford/Bread Loaf faculty member, choosing among a rich range of topics, from the “Margins of Medieval Literature”
“Here we are after an outdoor performance of Twelfth Night at Oxford Castle. It rained for most of the play, but never enough for the play to be canceled. A classic English experience.”
— Josh Kotin
and “Shakespeare’s Stage” to the “Modernist Novel.” A Princeton faculty member guides exploration of archives and other resources preparatory to writing the senior thesis. This summer the faculty member was Josh Kotin, associate professor of English, who shares a photo of an English summer in this section of the report.
Prizes Awarded to Senior English Majors, May 2024
Rebecca Cao
The Divine Shell
Earl R. Miner Thesis Prize
Juliette Carbonnier
Bodywork
Alan S. Downer Prize
Joseph Himmelfarb
Tales of Man’s Best Surrogate
Thomas H. Maren Thesis Prize
Josh Kotin with students in the 2024 Bread Loaf Summer at Oxford. Photo by Rachel Applebaum
Charlotte Leane
Unspeakable: Syntax and Secrecy in the Fin de Siècle Gothic
Charles William Kennedy Prize
Emma Reynolds
Knowing the Invisible: The Wageless Labor of Black Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel Isadore and Helen Sacks Memorial Prize
Gabriel Robare
Part I of Seamus Heaney’s North: An Annotated Edition
Class of 1870 Old English Prize
Grace Rocker
Composite Beings: Girls, Zines, and Archives from Decades Past to Feminist Futures
Lee M. Elman Class of 1958 Hemingway Prize
Jamie Rodriguez
Telling Entanglements: Erotic Narrative as Environmental Praxis
Edward H. Tumin Memorial Prize
Chloe Satenberg
Not Your Buddy
Senior Comprehensive Award
Claire Schultz
Wandering Souls: Searching for Home in the Novels of Eliot and Dickens
Class of 1859 Prize
Jessica Scott
This is Not a Story to Pass On: (Inverse) Consumption of Black Horror Throughout
American Entertainment History
Walter C. Hughes Memorial Prize
Sierra Stern
Tenderfoot
Thomas B. Wanamaker English Language Prize
Prizes Awarded to Graduate Students, First-Year Students, Sophomores, and Juniors
Graduate Students
Diana Little
McCosh Teaching Award
First-Year Students (Class of 2027)
Ivy Chen
Class of 1883 English Prize for Academic Freshmen
The E.E. Cummings Academy of American Poets Prize
Sophomores (Class of 2026)
Melanie Garcia
Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize
Morris W. Croll Poetry Prize
Dana Serea
Ward Mathis Prize
Juniors (Class of 2025)
Rachel Brooks
Francis Biddle Sophomore Prize*
Annie Cao
Class of 1870 Sophomore Prize*
Isabelle Clayton
Emily Ebert Junior Prize
Eleanor Hunt
Class of 1870 Junior Prize
* Received in junior year for work judged after sophomore year.
2023-24 University and External Prizes
Faculty
Maria DiBattista
Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Graduate Mentoring Award
McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and the Graduate School
The award recognizes Princeton faculty members who nurture the intellectual, professional and personal growth of their graduate students.
Autumn Womack
Associate Professor of African American Studies and English
William Sanders Scarborough Prize
Modern Language Association
Awarded to Womack for her book The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Graduate Students
Pasquale Toscano
Collaborative Teaching Initiative Graduate Teaching Award
McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and the Graduate School
Awarded in recognition of outstanding ability as a preceptor for “Bodies and Belonging in Milton’s Epic Tradition.”
Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship
Princeton University
Princeton University’s top honor for graduate students, the fellowships support the students’ final year of study at Princeton and are awarded to one Ph.D. student in each of the four divisions — humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering — whose work has exhibited the highest scholarly excellence.
Diana Little
Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Research Grant
Keats-Shelley Association of America
Awarded for field work in the south of England about chalk geology and chalk industry for her dissertation, “Imperial Erosions: The Geological Poetics of Empire in Britain and America, 1780-1850.”
The Purpose of Playing
Sarah Malone / Department of English
On the afternoon of Oct. 16, 2023 — cool but sunny in London — students in the seminar “The Purpose of Playing” stepped out onto the open-air thrust stage of Shakespeare’s Globe theater.
Bearing in hand pages of lines from plays they’d read in the course, they performed their selections to the theater’s open central yard and three tiers of wooden bench seating, a theatrical space designed drawing on archival and archaeological research to recreate the scale, sound (unamplified), ambience and sonic signature (English oak and open air) in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ plays were performed (in the Globe, by adult male companies) when newly written.
“As Hamlet explains in an often-quoted speech,” noted Bailey Sincox, Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and lecturer in the Humanities Council, English and humanistic studies, “‘the purpose of playing’ is ‘to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature, to show […] the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”’ (Hamlet F 3.2.15-32).
Hamlet’s advice to the traveling players is in some ways universal, Sincox said — theater then as now is a representational art form — however it also stresses the particular, which prompts the question, Sincox said, “What was the ‘age and body’ of Hamlet’s time, and what sort of ‘playing’ was imagined to mirror it?”
Students in the seminar
“The Purpose of Playing” onstage at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Photos by Bailey Sincox
Reading Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
Up to and after fall break, weekly readings took the students through plays written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and occasional collaborators or antagonists, from Christopher Marlowe’s 1590 Doctor Faustus to Elizabeth Cary’s 1613 The Tragedy of Mariam. The students read plays performed at public amphitheaters and in private halls, by adult male actors, by children’s companies and by royalty. Each week’s dramatic primary source was paired with related secondary readings from later scholarship, from studies of the playhouses and stages of Elizabethan popular theater to studies of acting techniques, props, costumes, scenery, and dramaturgy, and the interconnected network of playwrights who tailored their scripts to diverse theaters and the audiences that frequented them.
The course’s fall break trip to London, supported by a Humanities Council Magic Grant, enabled the students to exercise the critical eye developed in classroom discussion in direct encounters with cultural sites designed to preserve Shakespeare (and, occasionally, his contemporaries) for the public.
At Shakespeare’s Globe
At Shakespeare’s Globe, the students received a backstage tour and participated in a performance workshop, following attending a Globe performance of As You Like It the night before as “groundlings” standing in the yard below the stage.
Above: To speak, perhaps to dream... From left, sophomores Zoha Khan, Zach Gardner and Cathy Di, and senior Elliott Hyon.
Above right: A pause for a photo in a lecture with an upper gallery view.
Right: Actor Philip Bird leads a series of exercises at Shakespeare’s Globe to help students explore Shakespeare’s language.
Class of 2025 member Alejna Kolenovic noted how the workshop helped “all of the subsequent texts we read in class to come to life. While reading, I became more conscious of how space impacts scene.”
Throughout the trip, Zoha Khan, a member of the Class of 2026, connected “The Purpose of Playing” and a concurrent fall 2023 English department course, “Bodies and Belonging in Milton’s Epic Tradition,” taught by Nigel Smith, the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature and professor of English, and graduate instructor Pasquale Toscano. The connection became particularly vivid looking at the Globe through a disability studies lens.
Attending As You Like It in the open yard, Khan said, required standing for the entirety of the show, “and to constantly shift to see the performance.”
From the galleries, “especially the upper galleries,” the structure of the theater and people within the crowd itself could obstruct the view of the play, Khan said. “Reaching the upper galleries proved especially difficult with its narrow, winding stairs that could limit many from sitting there.”
In “The Purpose of Playing,” Khan noted, “we learned about how different classes were ‘supposed’ to sit in specific parts of the theater, segregating viewing perspectives. Even in the seemingly egalitarian theater, “space could be both a disabling and limiting experience.”
Experiencing the teachings of the two courses “come to life in England,” Khan said, “showed me that in both the structure of the theatre and beyond, we must be aware of how we treat and occupy space, and ensure that it is available for all to enjoy the show.”
Beyond the Globe
In the next days, the students visited the nearby archaeological sites of the original Globe and the Rose Theater for talks on how recent findings have informed scholarship on public playhouse practices. They visited Whitehall Banqueting House and halls at Christ Church College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, among the venues where private performance emerged and flourished in the early 1600s. At Corpus Christi, they collaborated with Oxford English students in a workshop in which they handled early printed editions of Ben Jonson’s works, an anti-theatrical polemic by John Rainolds, and an eyewitness account of Shakespeare’s Othello, among other items from the college’s special collections. In a visit to the archives of the British Library, they learned about its unique early modern dramatic manuscripts, including the “book” of Sir Thomas More, which bears traces of collaborative authorship.
“This trip gave me a renewed sense of engaged, hands-on-learning,” Woellert said. “Beyond topics in early modern theater, this trip and its professors helped me realize the extent to which my research at Princeton can expand, and just how many opportunities and resources are available.”
Returning to Princeton, the students began preparation for production of individual original, historical-informed performances as their final projects. Each student chose a scene or scenes from a play read during the semester, sketched plans for the scenes in a “director’s notebook,” and wrote an accompanying essay. Performances could be live or recorded, performed or directed by the student, or, with instructor approval, presented in an alternative format.
“Puppets? Animation?” Sincox suggested. “The sky’s the limit…”
Collaborative workshop with Oxford English students.
Left: In the British Library early modern dramatic manuscript collection.
Below: The Banqueting House, on Whitehall in the City of Westminster, central London, is among the venues where private performance emerged and flourished in the early 1600s.
Above:
Teaching Faculty and Lecturers in the English Department, 2023 to 2024
Sarah M. Anderson
Senior Lecturer in English
Eduardo Cadava
Philip Mayhew Professor of English
Zahid R. Chaudhary
Associate Professor of English
Anne Anlin Cheng Professor of English
Kristina Chesaniuk
Lecturer in English (spring)
Andrew Cole
Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and Professor of English
Bradin Cormack
Professor of English
Maria DiBattista
Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Jeff Dolven Professor of English
Frances Ferguson
Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of English (spring)
Diana Fuss
Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English
Sophie Gee
Associate Professor of English
Simon Gikandi
Class of 1943 University Professor of English
William A. Gleason
Hughes-Rogers Professor of English and American Studies
Ryan Heuser
Associate Research Scholar in the Center for Digital Humanities and Lecturer in English (fall)
Monica Huerta
Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Claudia L. Johnson
Murray Professor of English Literature
Sylvia Khoury-Yacoub
Lecturer in Theater and the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Department of English
Joshua Kotin
Associate Professor of English
Russ Leo
Associate Professor of English
Rhodri Lewis
Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer with Rank of Professor
Meredith Martin
Associate Professor of English and Director, Center for Digital Humanities
Lee Clark Mitchell
Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres
Paul Nadal
Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Kinohi Nishikawa
Associate Professor of English and African American Studies
Rob Nixon
Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment; Professor of English and the High Meadows Environmental Institute
Jeff Nunokawa Professor of English
Fintan O’Toole
Visiting Lecturer in English and Theater and the Lewis Center for the Arts; Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ‘53 Professor in Irish Letters (fall)
Robbie Richardson
Assistant Professor of English
Sarah Rivett
Professor of English and American Studies
Gayle Salamon
Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies
Bailey Sincox
Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and English (fall)
Esther (Starry) Schor
John J.F. Sherrerd ‘52 University Professor and Chair, Council of the Humanities; Director, Program in Humanistic Studies and the Stewart Seminars in Religion
D. Vance Smith
Professor of English
Nigel Smith
William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature and Professor of English
Robert Spoo
Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters and Professor of English
Tamsen Wolff
Associate Professor of English
Susan Wolfson
Professor of English
Autumn Womack
Associate Professor of African American Studies and English
