Your December 2025 reads
This month’s featured titles include fiction from A&S alum Thomas Pynchon ’59, an award-winning poetry collection and a study of a small town.
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Welcome! Literatures in English as a department teaches students how to read and write about literary cultures. Supported by excellent libraries and in connection with a number of interdisciplinary programs at Cornell, Literatures in English invites students and scholars to engage in conversations about global cultures as they develop skills for the future.
Throughout history, poets find inspiration at Cornell
Cornell’s influence on the art and academic discipline of poetry has been deep throughout the university’s history and continues on campus today, where scholars and poets discuss and refine this art form in graduate seminars, gather for open mic nights and study the craft of creating beautiful and meaningful work in undergraduate classrooms.
Discover Cornell poets and the experiences that have shaped them.
Recent Highlights from the Department
Undergrads launch magazine featuring in-depth stories
A new student-run magazine focuses on long-form journalism that reflects the culture of Cornell and Ithaca.
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Plot Twist! Professors Love Genre Fiction and You Should Too
Finding joy in reading through Genre writing. In the course How Reading Changes Your Life, Prof. Raskolnikov is on a mission to help students rediscover that sense of wonder often lost after childhood. The students enrolled in the class are “beginning to realize that in addition to having a job, y...
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Your November 2025 reads
This month’s titles featured in Cornellians include poetry, a famed restaurateur’s memoir, and a chronicle of the 1929 stock market crash
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Professor emerita Stephanie Vaughn, ‘writer’s writer,’ dies at 81
Vaughn taught creative writing and literature at Cornell for 39 years, retiring in 2022 as professor of literatures in English emerita.
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How fiction and film are shaping the Occupation narrative in France
In two new books, Daniel R. Schwarz considers France and the Holocaust – and how literature and film can correct erroneous depictions of history.
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Nexus Scholar alumni profile: Neel Mehta '23
"The skills that you pick up in the lab are always going to stay with you."
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Combining humanities and tech for research gains
An interdisciplinary project is sparking collaborations among those interested in digital approaches to the study of history, languages and culture.
Read moreLiteratures in English Destinations
Recent Books by Department of Literatures in English Faculty
Department faculty continually publish important works of criticism, fiction, poetry, and essays. Visit Literatures in English Faculty: Recent Books to learn more.
Land Acknowledgment
Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' (the Cayuga Nation). The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign Nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York state, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' dispossession, and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' people, past and present, to these lands and waters.
This land acknowledgment has been reviewed and approved by the traditional Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' leadership.
Statement from the Department of Literatures in English
We, the faculty and staff of the Cornell Literatures in English department, pledge to support and do our utmost to protect members of our community who are discriminated against, unjustly treated, or otherwise targeted because of race, religion, gender identification, sexuality, immigration status, ability, and other forms of difference.
Recognizing that words and symbols can be manipulated into violence, we renew our commitment to direct the force of language toward large and small acts of learning, alliance, imagination, and justice.