Course Descriptions for Fall 2008

Ann Romines writes of a recent trip to Quebec to address a prestigious gathering of scholars: Novelist Willa Cather visited Quebec City for the first time in 1928, passing through on the way to her summer home on Grand Manan Island. When her companion, Edith Lewis, came down with the flu, their overnight stay stretched…

Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities In his book Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that “[w]e need to consider why we find anachronism productive.” And in this symposium on slippages and slidings of time, place, space, and identity, we hope to explore just that. Despite our discipline’s best efforts to encode…

English major and creative writing minor Gowri Koneswaran (class of 1997) writes: I’ve been thinking about the folks in the English department a lot lately! For the past four years, I’ve been working down the street at The Humane Society of the United States. For some of my non-creative writing, check out this article I…

Would you like to learn more about the early modern period and to do research in one of the world’s best collections of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books? The Folger-GW Undergraduate Seminar on “Books and Early Modern Culture” is a rare opportunity to study at the Folger Shakespeare Library with experts in the field of book…

Natasha Simons can read 700 words per minute, cites her final paper for Jeffrey Cohen’s Chaucer course as one of greatest accomplishments as an undergraduate, had a 3.8 GPA., and had two and a half years of publishing internships. Naturally one would expect a woman as talented and experienced as her to get a job…

by J J Cohen From Geoffrey Galt Harpham, president and director of the National Humanities Center, writing in The Chronicle: The alleviation of human suffering, the restoration of opportunity, and the resurrection of confidence must be our top priorities. But the present crisis must not be the horizon of our thinking; our most immediate concerns…