Happy holiday season from the new Chair.

And perhaps it’s time to reintroduce ourselves. Our new name, the Department of Literatures in English, opens the horizons of where and when our “subject” happens. Our department has long looked beyond the country of England, and we have paid a growing attention to the variety of Englishes across time and around the globe. Our name flags the wide range of what we teach as well as how literary studies have expanded in recent years.

In keeping with this expansion, we have recently introduced new major requirements to reflect the breadth of literatures written in English. We now formally require students to take not only courses on literature in English before 1800; we also require courses on literatures of the Americas (including American Indian or Indigenous, African American, Asian American, Asian Pacific Islander, and Latinx) and the Global South (African Literatures in English, African Diaspora Literatures in English, Asian Diaspora Literatures in English, Caribbean Literatures in English, South Asian Literatures in English).

We are able to represent this scope because of our world-class, prize-winning faculty. Just in the past two years, Valzhyna Mort won both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rome Prize; Ishion Hutchinson won the Musgrave Gold Medal, Jamaica’s highest and oldest literary award; Derrick Spires won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book; Juliana Hu Pegues was awarded the Lora Romero Publication Prize for the best first book in American Studies and scholar and curator Tim Murray was named the Chair of the Board of Directions of the Humanities New York. Cornell has also recognized a number of Literatures in English faculty for their exceptional teaching: Jane Juffer won the Stephen H. Weiss Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring; Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon was awarded the Morgan Chia-Wen Sze and Bobbi Josephine Hernandez Distinguished Teaching Prize; and Elisha Cohn and Cathy Caruth both won Russell Distinguished Teaching Prizes. We have two new endowed chairs, too: novelist J. Robert Lennon was appointed to the Ann S. Bowers Chair; scholar Shirley Samuels was appointed to the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Chair in American Studies.

Our ventures have sometimes crossed from gown to town. In Fall 2021, in partnership with the new African America Studies Program at the Ithaca High School, the Department created the Reading Partnership initiative, which, under Professor Laura Brown’s guidance, connects volunteer Cornell undergraduates with IHS students, who together explore a text from a list put together by Cornell graduate students. The Department funded the purchase of the texts and the graduate student manager of the program, Banseok Heo.

Our students’ achievements in community-building were “an inspiration,” as Vice President Joel Malina put it when he awarded the Cornell Campus-Community Leadership Award to Claire Deng (Literatures in English, BA ’22), who, while working at the History Center, collaborated with the Ithaca Asian American Association to trace early Asian residents of Tompkins County, as an effort to challenge the common view that our community’s Asian population and history is limited to recent students. She found Asian families whose presence reaches back many decades, and identified Asian businesses in Ithaca from the late nineteenth century.

Preparing doctoral students for academic positions remains another core mission. Last year, five current or former PhDs accepted tenure-track jobs; two accepted visiting professorships; and four accepted Cornell lectureships. Two of our doctoral students won the University-wide Guilford Prize for best writing in a dissertation; both went on to prestigious multi-year post-docs. Our MFA students continue to pursue stellar writing careers. Our Zalaznick Reading Series, founded by a generous endowment by Barbara and David Zalaznick, has recently featured Julie Schumacher (MFA ’86), the first woman to have won the Thurber Prize for American Humor; Susan Choi (MFA ’95), who won a National Book Award; Téa Obreht (MFA ’09), a National Book Award finalist and an Orange Prize winner; and NoViolet Bulawayo (MFA ’10), a Man Booker Prize finalist.

Pursuing literatures in English not only opens deep and wide understandings of a vast span of human history but also offers keys to the well-informed, fully examined, and passionately meaningful life. This view rises with particular brilliance from Professor Derrick Spires’ recent comments on the 2022 PBS film, “Becoming Frederick Douglass”:

You want a handbook of how to be successful in this world? You want a handbook on how to advocate for Black rights, for justice; how to navigate really thorny moral, spiritual, political, legal issues? Read Douglass’ life. He walks you through how he does that.

In this department, we inspire others by being inspired ourselves, nurturing, extending, and passing on the imaginative flame.