To All Current English Majors

The parade of Pulitzers passing through the Jack Morton Auditorium has been great: Edward P. Jones at his inaugural reading, Michael Chabon, Art Spiegelman. We love that 300 people could fill the seats of that vast space and attend these talks. That these were standing room only made us all the more pleased that we…

RateMyProfessors can be a delicate subject for faculty members, who often mistrust and fear it the way business owners mistrust and fear Yelp! (“The food was awesome!” “The food was inedible!” “Awesome!” “Inedible!”). But according to an interesting piece in The Hatchet, the site ranking system seems to produce results that roughly mesh with evaluations…

Today I’m reposting information about Prof. Jeffrey Cohen’s ENGL 42W: Myths of Britain course for fall 2010. There are still spots left in this class, which meets twice weekly, once for a lecture and once for a break-out session. The class fulfills the English Department prerequisite, and it also satisfies Humanities and WID general curriculum…

Christina Beasley. Photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis. The first-place winner of this year’s Academy of American Poets’ University and College Poetry Prize is Christina Beasley ’12, an International Affairs major and Creative Writing minor. Christina will receive a $100 prize and a one-year membership to the Academy. Honorable mention goes to senior Annie-Rose Strasser, an…

Nadeem Aslam’s visa has been so delayed by government scrutiny that it will not be granted in time to enable our October and November events. Our inaugural GW-British Council Writer in Residence will therefore have to be postponed. We are attempting to reschedule the residency for February. Mr. Aslam is eager to come to GW….

Happy Memorial Day to readers! I wish I had a dollar–no, make that $25–for every time someone has asked me whether, as a university professor, I “work” during the summers when I’m typically not teaching. For English graduate students and faculty, summer indeed offers a respite from the usual round of classes, office hours, meetings,…