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The College of Arts & Sciences
The Cornell Literatures in English Department retains the pluralistic ideals of the university’s founders and continues to respond to and embody a constantly evolving discipline. Within the department, ongoing debates about the role of critical theory or cultural studies, the status of popular culture, the relevance of film studies and hip hop, or the definition of the words “English” and “literature” themselves have led to new understandings of the discipline, as well as a range of textual productivity, from producing critical editions to writing poetry.
Outside the department, the growth of interdisciplinary work has led to a range of connections across the humanities at Cornell, from comparative literature to medieval studies, from Asian-American Studies to feminist, gender and sexuality studies, with English faculty maintaining affiliations in all of these disciplines.
Along with teaching more than a third of the Freshman Writing Seminars offered by Cornell’s Knight Institute of Writing in the Disciplines, the Literatures in English Department’s nourishing of this wide range of scholarly and creative writing has maintained the department’s central importance in the humanities at Cornell and world-wide.
The Department of Literatures in English is host to many gifted student writers and teachers. Thanks to the generosity of various donors, annual prizes are awarded for outstanding work in poetry, fiction, research, critical writing, and instruction. We are pleased to announce our 2022 - 2023 student...
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This summer, 101 students in the College of Arts and Sciences will take part in groundbreaking research on campus with 61 faculty as part of the Nexus Scholars Program.
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Part of Cornell's Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, Cornell students explored creative ways to understand urban landscapes during two cross-disciplinary courses this year.
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The end-of-year HSP research conference May 5 featured presentations by 45 senior undergraduates.
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The fellowships will provide a stipend as well as funding for research and other activities.
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Eve Ogden Schaub ’92, BA ’93, BFA ’93, caps off her trilogy of memoirs with "Year of No Garbage."
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Vee Cipperman is an English major.
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"If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem."
— M.H. Abrams, Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus