Margaret Soltan on the BBC

This semester I’m teaching a new course called “Myths of Britain,” a slow read of six works that are animated by the transnationalism of the Middle Ages. The class is the largest I’ve ever had: eighty students, most of them freshmen and sophomores. Contrast this behemoth with my course for the past two semesters: “Chaucer,”…

President Knapp graciously hosted the faculty of the English Department at his F St home yesterday. Although he holds a part-time job as president of a major urban university, Steven Knapp is most famous as a scholar of 18th- and 19th-century English literature and literary theory. He holds his tenure in the English Department at…

No, that’s not me. That’s the guy who played the Maytag Repairman on TV. More about that later. It’s a pleasure to have been handed the keys to this blog from Jeffrey Cohen, our Department’s Chair Emeritus (a title I have just now invented and summarily bestowed). To be honest, it’s also a bit daunting….

Professor Gayle Wald is once again teaching her very successful English 40W, Literature of the Americas. She was recently thumbing through old GW Bulletins and reports on her archival work: In preparation for ENGL 40, our Literature of the Americas class, I decided to look at GWU Bulletins once a decade, beginning in 1918-1919 and…

From today’s Hatchet, a piece on Prof. Robert McRuer’s innovative new class by Gabriella Schwarz: Most field trips for GW classes require a Metro farecard, but passports were necessary for 13 students in an English course this fall. The class, “Transnational Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures,” taught by professor Robert McRuer, went to the Czech…

[illustration: gang of festive t-shirt wearers in English Department main office. Note the angelic backlight that illuminates all who wear our official shirt.] So Christina Katopodis took us literally: she sent a picture of her GW English T shirt on a houseplant — a shrub named “Gertrude” (though wouldn’t it make more sense to name…