Poem of the Day: William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”
October can be an interesting time for literature professors writing about contemporary novelists, because the Swedish Academy announces the Nobel Prize in Literature during this time, changing the fate of little-known masters overnight or causing controversies around acclaimed authors to arise. Many English departments offer courses on world literature and Nobel laureates. This…
On Saturday, February 4th 2017, scholars, professors, and students from a wide range of disciplines came together within the newly renovated walls of The National Churchill Library & Center within The George Washington University’s Gelman Library to attend the GW Digital Humanities Institute’s 2017 Symposium: Global Chaucer and Shakespeare in…
This semester honors student Katherine Bradshaw took home first prize at GW Humanities Day for her work on Shakespeare’s King Lear! Katherine is majoring in English as well as Classics and has been working on her Luther Rice Fellowship project, which focuses on another Shakespearean work, Coriolanus. Professor Alexa Alice Joubin was Katherine’s mentor for her successful…
Spring Smells of Lilacs Early spring is, famously, cruel. The bite of winter is still sharp, even “whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote” (“when that April with his sweet showers pierce the drought of March”). Chaucer’s famous opening lines of the Canterbury Tales emphasize…
One Art The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing…
A view of Dublin Our first Academic Year 2013-2014 entry in our On the Road series comes from Assistant Professor Daniel DeWispelare: Research archives exist in diverse forms: some actual, some digital, others museal, or microfilmic, etc. And for a certain species of literary scholar, of which I am one, the physical archive is…