We will be brief this time

On Feb. 24, the English department cosponsored an event with the Office of the President honoring new Folger Shakespeare Library Director Michael Witmore, who assumed the position in July after the retirement of GW Prof. Emerita Gail Kern Paster. Pres. Knapp and Diane Knapp opened the F Street House to about three dozen invitees, including…

Graduate students in GW’s English Department have launched a brand new theory reading group. With the start of classes, they are pleased to announce the first meeting of M.A.T.C.H. (Mobilizing an Active Theory Community in the Humanities), which will be from 5pm to 6pm on Thursday, September 13th. The meeting will commence in the Rome…

Check out the profile of English Prof. Kavita Daiya in the fall 2010 issue of The Asian Connection, the newsletter of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, covering Spring and Summer 2010. Prof. Daiya’s research investigates questions of violence, displacement, and ethnic nationalism in South Asia. Her book Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture…

The invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century played a major role in the creation of Renaissance culture and in the development of the modern world. Without the printing press, the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution might not have spread throughout Europe, poem- and novel-writing might not have become viable professions,…

Allegra Goodman Novelist Allegra Goodman will be reading at the Marvin Center Amptitheater at 7 p.m. on Thursday as a part of Prof. Faye Moskowitz’s Jewish Literature Live course. The class explores the works of a variety of contemporary Jewish-American authors and features them in class visits and public readings. Heralded as a “modern-day Jane…

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,”…