Book Launch Celebration for José Esteban Muñoz

What do the two people in our blog post title have in common, besides serenity and good looks? Funny you should ask. Both the Dalai Lama and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson were just named in the Utne Reader list of “Fifty Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is, of course, our inaugural GW English Distinguished…

One of my first initiatives as chair of the English Department was the dedication of a large bulletin board by the main office to the achievements of our faculty and students. Publications, posters, and media mentions adorn the board, yielding to any visitor ample evidence of how accomplished a department we are. Unfortunately over the…

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,”…

JEWISH LITERATURE LIVE A few years ago Ariel Sabar quit his day job as an award winning journalist in order to work on a book. The shift from journalism to book writing was a challenge, but even more challenging was the subject of his book My Father’s Paradise, his father and his father’s history as…

This feature is the beginning of a story entitled “Baby Danny” by Drew Welke, a student in Ginnie Hartman’s Intermediate Fiction 103 class. Usually, two people would have to stay in the shop late to close up, but today, Jack had been left alone. Everyone else was helping unload tents, tables, and chairs at a…

From Prof. Harris’s essay “Untimely Meditations”: Once upon a time, Time was all the rage in Shakespeare scholarship. Though Time’s longue durée lasted from approximately 1960 to 1980, its high-water mark was arguably 1964. In that year, Shakespeare Quarterly published no fewer than three essays on Shakespearean Time, including studies of Time in Romeo and…