Best wishes

Dear friends,It has been my pleasure to serve as chair of the GW English Department for the past three and a half years. Now that my term of service is coming to an end, I want to thank you for the support you’ve given me to make this time in office so enjoyable — and…

The short stretch between June and August is one of the few times I have a chance to read some non-work related fiction. This summer I found two novels that I would highly recommend you add to your own list. 1. Paul Auster, The Book of IllusionsThe best way I can describe this book is…

Those of you who have been by the English department on the 7th floor might have noticed the department’s empty bulletin board. To put it to use, I’d like to suggest creating a “featured undergraduate” section for the department, where picture and biographies of some of the English department’s undergraduates can be displayed each semester….

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,”…

[beautiful picture of Margaret Soltan by Nick Gingold, Senior Staff Photographer for the GW Hatchet]From today’s Hatchet, an interview with Professor Margaret Soltan:First of all, I wanted to talk to you about American writer David Foster Wallace, what he meant and what his suicide means for the literary world. My sense of it is that,…

Sophomore Mary Kate Sherwood is currently taking Professor Tammy Greenwood-Stewart’s Intermediate Fiction 103 class. Here is an excerpt from her her story “Price Check.” “Shut up,” grunted Cathy, trying to push herself up onto the checkout counter. She kicked a carton of cigarettes out from under the register, stepped onto its flimsy cardboard, and clambered…