English Dept GWU

Join us and listen in as Dean Wahlbeck leads a new conversation series related to the November elections! The first one focuses on IMMIGRATION & MIGRATION; Dean Wahlbeck and faculty experts discuss global analysis of immigration and migration with a focus on historical and cultural perspectives. Please share and spread the word to learn from cutting-edge researchers across the disciplines.

Session I: IMMIGRATION & MIGRATION

Tuesday, September 24 | 5 p.m. EDT Lehman Auditorium (B1220) | Science & Engineering Hall

Featuring Dean Paul Wahlbeck in conversation with faculty experts to discuss the global analysis of immigration and migration:

Elizabeth Chacko, Professor of Geography and International Affairs

Thomas Guglielmo, Professor of American Studies and History

Kimberly Morgan, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

Elizabeth Vaquera, Director of the GW Cisneros Hispanic Leadership Institute and Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and Public Administration

Mark your calendar for our flagship event on AI on Wednesday October 22, featuring Professor N. Katherine Hayles. It will take place in person in the GW Textile Museum as well as on Zoom.

Public Lecture on AI by N. Katherine Hayles - Department of English Modes of Cognition: Implications for AI Public lecture by Professor N. Katherine Hayles, 11:30 am, Wednesday October 23, 2024 In-person and Zoom hybrid event. Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97309041943 Myers Room, George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum, 701 21st St NW, Washington,....

Welcome back to campus and to the 2024-2025 academic year, with a special welcome to first-year students and newly declared majors and minors! I’m delighted to greet you in my role as Chair of the English Department. --- Professor Tony Lopez

Welcome Back from the Department Chair - Department of English Dear English Department students, Welcome back to campus and to the 2024-2025 academic year, with a special welcome to first-year students and newly declared majors and minors! I’m delighted to greet you in my role as Chair of the English Department. I return for my second year leading the departm...

So fun to see Chet’la Sebree shine (of course!) last night at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda. Here she is with novelist John Vercher discussing his newest work, Devil Is Fine.

Following up on our recent post about Professor Edward P. Jones' wonderful achievement in the Times' list of best books of the 21st century, here's an article in today's Times about him: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/books/review/edward-p-jones-interview-the-known-world.html

English majors are needed! English Dept GWU Professor Alexa Alice Joubin spoke at the QS Summit on AI and Higher Education, where she argued that meta-cognition and critical questioning skills are among the most important competency in the era of artificial intelligence.

English Professor at QS Summit on AI - Department of English According to Professor Alexa Alice Joubin, meta-cognition and critical questioning skills are among the most important competency in the era of artificial intelligence. Prof. Joubin spoke at the QS Summit.

The English Department and the Creative Writing program congratulate Edward P. Jones, Professor of Creative Writing, whose novel, The Known World, was chosen by the New York Times as the fourth-best book of the 21st century! The Known World is the highest-ranked American novel on the list. Professor Jones’ story collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, was also honored with inclusion on the list.

The brilliance of Edward’s literary work is matched by his excellence as a teacher and colleague. Congratulations, Edward, for this remarkable achievement!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html

These Creative Writing & English majors walked together in the CCAS ceremony on Saturday. We’re so proud of all our graduating seniors, and so excited to see what you’ll do next! Congratulations, everyone! 🎉 👏 🎊

GW graduates and hanging out with Jen Psaki. What a celebration of our graduates in the shadow of the Washington Monument.

GW graduation from my seat by Jen Psaki

We announced our prize winners and heard these senior Creative Writing & English majors give such wonderful readings of their Honors Theses on Friday 👉

So happy to see their fellow senior majors and minors come to cheer them on 👉

The faculty members are grateful to everyone who celebrated with us!

Many congratulations to the recipients of this year's creative writing prizes: Rachel Krumholz, Ángel Lagunas, Alex Griffin, Anhai Roantree, Bingqing Zhongdu, Aurea Gingras, Claire Lee, and Tyler Alexander.

Thank you to everyone who submitted and all the faculty judges!

GW’s Lannan Fellows celebrated National Poetry Month with a visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library to hear a reading by poet Edward Hirsch. The fellows are pictured with Teri Cross-Davis, Folger Poetry Program Manager, and creative writing faculty.

We held a beautiful memorial ceremony for our friend and colleague, Daniel J DeWispelare, yesterday. We sang praises high, mourned, hugged, kissed, and fed ourselves on stories of this wonderful human being’s life. You have touched us all Daniel! Your memory is a blessing.

Friday, April 19th, come join us for a poetry reading with Azad Ashim Sharma at the new GW bookstore! Azad is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Boiled Owls. This collection of poems demystifies drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, and anxiety whilst thinking through their relation to capitalism and its resistance, the family, and a writer’s compulsion to write.

We closed out the Jenny McKean Moore spring series with Assistant Professor Annie Liontas reading from their brilliant memoir, S*x with a Brain Injury 👉 It was a full house! 👉 There was cake! 👉 Thanks to Emma Wu for a heartfelt intro 👉 Thanks to Professors Robert McRuer and Jonathan Hsy for the additional photos 👉 And thanks to all the students and faculty who attended and helped celebrate.

The last event of the Spring '24 Jenny McKean Reading Series will feature GW English and Creative Writing professor 🩷 Annie Liontas 💜 reading from their critically acclaimed memoir-in-essays, S*X WITH A BRAIN INJURY. Come join us at the GW Textile Museum on Thursday, April 11 to hear Annie read from a book that Kirkus Reviews has called "an intimate memoir of a profound affliction and resilience."

🩷 Reading at 5:30 PM. Celebratory reception in Annie's honor from 6:30 to 8 PM. 💜

Last call for current GW students to submit your work for the following annual creative writing prizes:

THE JULIAN CLEMENT CHASE CREATIVE WRITING PRIZE IN WASHINGTON
Best work of fiction or creative nonfiction that includes or incorporates the District of Columbia

THE ASTERE E. CLAEYSSENS PRIZE
Best play or play excerpt

THE STUDENT POETRY PRIZE
Best single poem

THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS STUDENT POETRY PRIZE
Best group of 5 poems

Please contact Prof. Jung Yun ([email protected]) for more info & submission links.

Thank you to Marie-Helene Bertino for a brilliant Jenny McKean Moore reading (shown here with Professor Jennifer Close, who gave a heartfelt intro). We’re grateful to all the students and faculty who came out for the event!

The New York Times calls Marie-Helene Bertino's BEAUTYLAND a "remarkable funny-sad novel" that brilliantly explores themes of gender, otherness, and coming of age. Please join us at this week's Jenny McKean Moore Reading to welcome Bertino to GW!

GW English is delighted to host Just Care: A Different University, a talk on Asian American students, mental health, and networks of care for all on Wednesday, March 6, 2024, 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm, Gelman Library, Churchill Room. Our speakers will be Mimi Khúc, James Kyung-Jin Lee, and erin Khuê Ninh. This talk is funded by the English Department's Wang Endowment.

Obituary for Daniel DeWispelare in the GW Hatchet: https://gwhatchet.com/2024/02/26/cherished-english-professor-british-romanticism-scholar-dies-at-40/

One of our friends and interviewees in our feature-length documentary film “Disposable Humanity”, Andreas Knitz, provided us with a beautiful description of the edible memorial he and his fellow artists and advocates recently held to commemorate the lives of those lost in WWII institutions during t4 due to the imposition of starvation diets in psychiatric institutions. One of the classes I’ve developed at my university is a course on the literature of the Hawaiian Renaissance (Art and culture of indigenous and coerced diasporic people on the islands since the 1970s). One of the readings I assign for this class is a book of collective memories about native Hawaiian and indentured Asian servants diagnosed with leprosy on the island archipelago. In order to end the spread of the disease the Board of Health imposed a deportation scheme in 1866 that dispossessed patients of their families and generational homes. Upon arriving on their exiled beach in Molokai that was fortified by natural boundaries (steep cliff face, no roads, an absence of nearby water, housing, doctors, and hospital) the exiles found themselves put on starvation rations that assured higher mortality rates. When the exiles complained that the BOH was intentionally trying to make them “perish through starvation,” the monarchical government did everything it could to avoid responsibility for its pursuit of death-dealing neglect. Nearly 8,000 native Hawaiian and Asian exploited laborers diagnosed with leprosy were deported to Molokai from 1866-1969 (nearly 20 years after the sulfur cure became widely available). Today the site at Kalaupapa Beach stands as a memorial cemetery as well as a living testimony to medical complicity in settler colonialist designs to dispossess indigenous people through the tools of education, medicine, private property bureaucracy, and intentional lethality. Despite this death-dealing abandonment those diagnosed with the disease built a church and created a bare bones caregiving alternative community that preserved the well-being of disabled peoples’ worlds. This neglected history offers an addition to those like Andreas seeking to tell the global narrative of the use of starvation diets and medical exile as part of state disability expendability efforts being traced and helping us to keep alive.

www.nps.gov

A reminder for junior majors in Creative Writing & English: the deadline to apply for the Honors Thesis in Creative Writing is Leap Day, February 29!

Memorial plaque in honor of Daniel DeWispelare and other colleagues at GWU's Professors Gate.

If you're in the UK, consider making a pilgrimage to Oxford (before the 28th of April) to see the multimedia exhibition "Chaucer Here and Now" at the Bodleian Library! You can also check out the associated book which includes a chapter by our own Jonathan Hsy on "Chaucerian Multilingualism, Past and Present." The essay showcases works by many of the scholars, translators, and storytellers in the ever-expanding Global Chaucers network.

Chaucer Here and Now: New exhibit at the Bodleian Library by Candace Barrington by Candace Barrington After the initial flurry of publicity announcing the Bodleian Library’s Chaucer: Here and Now exhibit, it seems fitting to remind those in and arou…

A great crowd at this week’s Jenny McKean Moore reading with Edgar Kunz at GW Textile Museum. Thank you to everyone who attended, and to Sylvia Jones for a beautiful intro!

The George Washington University English Department mourns the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Associate Professor Daniel DeWispelare (1983-2024). We are devastated by this loss. Our heart goes out to Daniel and his memory, his family and friends, and to all of us in and beyond the GW English community. Daniel completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado and his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He was Visiting Assistant Professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Türkiye, before joining us on the GW English faculty in the fall of 2012 to work in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century British literature. In 2017, he published his book, Multilingual Subjects: On Standard English, Its Speakers, and Others in the Long Eighteenth Century. Daniel was brilliant, gentle, and kind, and he made a great impact on the lives of so many people—students, colleagues, folks in his everyday life. We’re thinking of you all in this time of grief. The English Department will hold a memorial for Daniel later this semester; that information will be posted here. We love you, Daniel.

Booklist calls Edgar Kunz's poetry collection, FIXER, "stunningly beautiful" and "unsparing, yet buoyant." Come hear Kunz read at the first Jenny McKean Moore reading of the spring semester on Thursday, February 1 at 5:30 p.m. at the Textile Museum.

Brave new world for US Shakespeare library as it displays its 82 First Folios Folger library in Washington has single biggest collection of world’s 235 surviving copies – until now kept hidden in a vault