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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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.
Popular Destinations
Interdisciplinary Reach
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.
Literatures in English Events
May
22
Friday
12:00 AM
University Commencement Weekend
Schoellkopf Field
May
23
Saturday
12:00 AM
University Commencement Weekend
Schoellkopf Field
May
24
Sunday
12:00 AM
University Commencement Weekend
Schoellkopf Field
Literatures in English News
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 involving faculty, staff and graduate students is sparking collaborations among those interested in computational, digital and data-driven approaches to the study of history, languages and culture.
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New digital collections preserve, examine Cornell history 
Newly published digital collections at Cornell University Library explore areas of Cornell history. Freely accessible online, the three new collections were digitized from materials held in Cornell University Library’s Rare and Manuscript Collections.
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Civil War still haunts American attitudes toward democracy
A new book by Shirley Samuels examines the story behind today’s divided America in literature and art created during and soon after the Civil War.
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Your October 2025 reads
This month’s featured titles include short stories, a fantasy book for tweens, and a scholarly look at Carmen adaptations – all by Arts & Sciences alumni and faculty.
Read more"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