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Support the Department of Literatures in English on Giving Day March 16

There are many ways in which your gift contributes to the continued success of the English Department. Gifts from Giving Day 2021 were instrumental in furthering faculty development, creating a research travel grant for MFA students, providing emergency funds for PhD students, and in supporting novel teaching ideas for undergraduate students.

Roger Gilbert

Roger Gilbert has taught at Cornell since 1987. His teaching and research focus on twentieth-century American poetry; he has also published essays on popular culture and aesthetics. His reviews of contemporary poetry appear regularly in Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. He is the author of Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry (Princeton, 1991). He is currently writing a critical biography of the late poet and Cornell professor A. R. Ammons, about whom he also edited a special issue of EPOCH and co-edited a collection of essays.

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Ilya Kaminsky to read from poetry collections March 24

Poet, translator, and essayist Ilya Kaminsky will read poems, discuss his collections “Dancing in Odessa” and “Deaf Republic,” and speak about his new work on March 24.

Vanderbilt's Jonathan Metzl to deliver Krieger Lecture

Jonathan Metzl, the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and the Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University is the speaker.

Michael Reynolds, M.S. ’17, Ph.D. ’21, postdoctoral associate in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the College of Engineering, demonstrated an origami model of a nanobot.

Panelists explore ‘Science of the Very, Very Small’

From a nanoscale “brobot” flexing its muscles to a discussion of the artistry of scientific images, participants at a March 9 event got an up-close look at how quantum science and nanotechnology are shaping our lives.

Andrew Galloway

I teach and write about a range of time-bound, but (I think) widely implicated features and transformations of medieval and early- early-modern literature and culture in England, c. 800-1600: book history; ethical norms and their literary and social expressions; Latin culture facing vernacular (English and French) transformations; economic modes before capitalism and their literary and historiographical resonances; reception of classical literature; women in literary, religious, and ritual contexts; medieval literary theory. Special focuses on Piers Plowman, Chaucer, John Gower, historical writing, forms of “lyric,” and fifteenth-century literature. Recent and in-progress essays on medieval economic theory and the place of poverty; Gower’s uses of classical literature; the reception of Gower in the seventeenth century; theory of the fourteenth-century lyric; clothing and fashion in Piers Plowman; the first specified payment for an English poem. Winner of the 2023 John Hurt Fisher Award for “significant contribution to the field of Gower Studies.”

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J. Ellen Gainor

J. Ellen Gainor is Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts. A specialist in British and American drama of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and women's dramaturgy, she is the author of the award-winning studies Shaw's Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Genderand Susan Glaspell in Context:American Theater, Culture and Politics 1915-48. She is aco-editor of The Norton Anthology of Drama, co-editor of TheComplete Plays of Susan Glaspell, and the editor ofGitha Sowerby: Three Plays. She has also edited the influential essay collections Imperialism and Theatreand the co-edited PerformingAmerica: Culture Nationalism in American Theater. Her latest publications includetheeditedvolume,Susan Glaspell in Context,for the Literature in Context series from Cambridge University Press, andthe co-edited Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory & Dramatic Criticism, which received the 2024 George Freedley Memorial Award Special Jury Prize from the Theatre Library Association. She previously served as a literary advisor to both the Mint Theater and the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York and has worked for the Shaw Festival in Canada and the National Theatre in England. She is an elected fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

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Emily Fridlund

Emily Fridlundgrew up in Minnesota. Her first novel,History of Wolves, was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award.History of Wolveswas also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, aNew York TimesEditor’s Choice, one ofUSA Today’s Notable Books, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and a #1 Indie Next pick. The opening chapter was awarded the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction. Fridlund’s debut collection of stories,Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her short fiction has appeared inBoston Review,ZYZZYVA,New Orleans Review,Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She earned an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.

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Ten A&S faculty honored with endowed professorships

These professorships continue the College’s priority to recognize faculty excellence and accomplishments.

Fred Moten, with a mostly white beard and black glasses in front of a microphone

Amiri Baraka’s poetry topic of March 31 Abrams talk

M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor, poet and theorist Fred Moten will deliver a lecture on radical Black politics and the poetry of Amiri Baraka.

David Faulkner

David Faulkner joined the Cornell faculty as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English in the summer of 2007. Previously, he had taught writing and literature at Princeton University, at Tompkins-Cortland and Broome community colleges, at Ithaca College, and, for the past fifteen years, at SUNY-Cortland. At Cortland, he took a leading role in the ongoing assessment and design of the Writing Program, including a stint as Acting Director in 2006. Since 1994, he has also taught, and trained new instructors, for Kaplan Educational Services. His primary responsibilities at Cornell will involve teaching in the first-year writing program, including the Writing Workshop, as well as teaching courses and acting as a course leader for the English Department. His dissertation, Broken English: Dickens, Kipling, Conrad and Woolf in Global Space, explores the transformation of English literary culture under the pressure of the first great wave of globalization in the 1860s. He has published and presented on such authors as Arnold and Dickens, Conrad and Woolf, Kipling and Wilde.

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Grant Farred

Grant Farred: PhD (Princeton University, 1997), MA (Columbia University, 1990), BA Honours, Cum laude, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, 1988). He has previously taught in the Program in Literature, Duke University, Williams College and Michigan University. He served as General Editor of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) from 2002 to 2010.

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Naminata Diabate

Naminata Diabate is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University and a member of the Advisory Board of the Africa Institute of the Global Studies University (GSU) in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Her interdisciplinary work exemplifies why she is affiliated with diverse fields of study and intellectual communities. At Cornell, she is affiliated faculty in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), affiliated with Visual Studies, and in the graduate fields of Literatures in English; Romance Studies; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies (LGBT); Performing and Media Arts (PMA); and Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC).

/naminata-diabate

Jonathan D. Culler

Jonathan Culler came to Cornell in 1977 as Professor of English and Comparative Literature and in 1982 succeeded M.H. Abrams in the Class of 1916 Chair.

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Grants aim to unite networks to increase impact

A team from Literatures in English and partner organizations is creating an inclusive, welcoming, anti-racist youth media network thanks to a grant from the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement.

M. NourbSe Philip wearing glasses and a checkered top, leaning on her hand.

PEN/Nabokov award winner M. NourbSe Philip to read her poetry April 14

The event is part of the Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series for the Creative Writing Program

Ling Ma, MFA ’15 to read from her fiction on March 10

“Severance” by ‘brilliant and exciting new writer” Ling Ma, MFA ’15, has received numerous awards.

Elisha Cohn

Elisha Cohn's research focuses on Victorian literature, theory of the novel, and animal studies. Her first book, Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2016), considers how states of reverie and trance shaped aesthetic forms. Her second book, Milieu: a Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel (Stanford University Press, 2025) rethinks the status of animals in global fiction, showing how contemporary narrative forms evoke the creatureliness of animal and human lives. She is also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of George Eliot (2025). She has also published essays in Contemporary Literature, Victorian Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture and elsewhere. Her current interests include the history of medicine, affect theory, and ecology.

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Eric Cheyfitz

Eric Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, is a faculty member of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP). Dr. Cheyfitz has served as director of theAIISP, the faculty coordinator of the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, and the director of the Mellon Post-doctoral Diversity Seminar. His scholarship and teaching focus on the force of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples and their ongoing resistance in the form of alternative ways of thought and action to the predatory capitalism embedded in settler existence. Exemplary of this work are his award winning bookThe Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization fromThe Tempestto Tarzan(1991, 1997), which was named byChoiceas one of the outstanding academic books of 1991; and his co-edited volumeSovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, a special issue ofSouth Atlantic Quarterlywhich won the award for the best special issue of an academic journal in 2011 given by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and was acknowledged for Outstanding Indigenous Scholarship in the same year by the American Indian and Alaska Native Professors Association.

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Cynthia Chase

Cynthia Chase teaches in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. She focuses on literature of the Romantic period and on nineteenth and twentieth century writing about the survival of poetry and the concept of human rights. Her recent teaching and research explore the formal and political issues involved in representing a writer’s life and work, especially those of women or poets. She is currently investigating how poetry and novels resurface as works of music or theater.

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Cathy Caruth

Cathy Caruth teaches in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. She focuses on the languages of trauma and testimony, on literary theory, and on contemporary discourses concerning the annihilation and survival of language. Her most recent books are Literature in the Ashes of History (Hopkins, 2013) and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (Interviews and Photography by Cathy Caruth) (Hopkins, 2014).

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Laura Brown

Laura Brown holds the John Wendell Anderson chair and has served as chair of the Department of Literatures in English, director of the English PhD program, Senior Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Professor Brown is a scholar and critic of eighteenth-century literary culture. She has published seven books and an edited volume, and many critical essays. Professor Brown studies posthumanism and the “counterhuman,” other-than-human beings and species difference, and the engagement with environmental and geological force in eighteenth-century literary culture. Her most recent books—The Counterhuman Imaginary: Storms, Pets, and Traveling Coinage and Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in Modern Literary Imagination—explore the impact of the other-than-human on human creativity.

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Musicologist and poet awarded Guggenheim fellowships

Alejandro L. Madrid, professor and chair of music, and Valzhyna Mort, associate professor of literatures in English, were honored as fellows.

Mary Pat Brady

Professor Brady is the author ofScales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx ChildandExtinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space(both from Duke University Press).Extinct Landswas awarded the Modern Language Association’s Prize for the Best Work of Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary and Cultural Criticism. She has also served as an associate editor of three editions of theHeath Anthology of American Literaturewhere she helped to expand the broader understanding of the contribution of Latina/o authors to US literature. Brady also edited the ten-volumeGale Researcher: 20thand 21stCentury American Literature Series(2017) and has written numerous essays on Chicana literature including, “The Contrapuntal Geographies ofWoman Hollering Creek and Other Stories”(published inAmerican Literaturein 1999) which won the Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in that journal for 1999. Currently the Director of the American Studies Program, she has also served as the Associate Chair of the Department, the Director of Graduate Studies and as the Director of Cornell’s Latina/o Studies Program. A proud, queer Chicana, Brady is also parent to three wonderful people.

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