Areas of Study

Creative Writing

Faculty

Alice Fulton

Ishion Hutchinson

Michael Koch

J. Robert Lennon

Joanie Mackowski

Robert Morgan

Ernesto Quiñonez

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Stephanie Vaughn

Helena Maria Viramontes

Emeriti

Lamar Herrin

Alison Lurie

Ken McClane

Maureen McCoy

James McConkey

Edgar Rosenberg

The Creative Writing Program offers workshop courses in fiction and poetry writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels. More than 500 undergraduates enroll in the program’s courses annually, many from schools outside the College of Arts and Sciences. English majors may concentrate in creative writing. Classes open to undergraduates from throughout the university are Creative Writing 280-281, Narrative Writing, Verse Writing, and the Senior Writing Seminar. The graduate-level program offers the MFA degree. During the academic year, the Creative Writing Program sponsors readings by distinguished guest writers and writers-in-residence. Students at all levels may participate in the open reading series “The Lounge Hour Reading Series.” A reading by graduating MFA students is held in the spring. Readings and receptions are free and open to all. The award-winning national literary journal Epoch is published by the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program.

Minority, Indigenous, and Third World Studies (MITWS)

Faculty

Elizabeth Anker

Jeremy Braddock

Mary Pat Brady

Eric Cheyfitz

Margo Crawford

Ella Diaz

Carole Boyce Davies

Laura Donaldson

Grant Farred

George Hutchinson

Jane A. Juffer

Satya Mohanty

Helena Viramontes

Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Shelley Wong

Dagmawi Woubshet

Emeriti

Kenneth McClane

MITWS is an area of concentration for undergraduates and graduate students in the English Department. Its basic premise is that the literatures of U.S. minority groups and third world (especially postcolonial) societies share and reflect similar histories of imperial conquest, slavery, and colonial rule. Knowledge of these literary and cultural traditions is thus deepened when they are approached both historically and comparatively. Students who take MITWS courses are encouraged to think about literature and culture in a global context, examining theoretical questions about history, politics, and ideology through their close readings of texts. Faculty and teaching assistants offer an unusually wide range of courses to facilitate original and imaginative work within and across African American, Asian American, American Indian, U.S. Latino/a, South Asian, Pacific, Caribbean, and African literatures, as well as other sub-fields in colonial/postcolonial, diaspora, and cultural studies.

American literary studies

Faculty

Kevin Attell

Mary Pat Brady

Jeremy Braddock

Eric Cheyfitz

Ella Diaz

Debra Fried

J. Ellen Gainor

Roger Gilbert

Molly Hite

George Hutchinson

Laura Donaldson

Kate McCullough

Jonathan Monroe

Robert R. Morgan

Shirley Samuels

Shelley Wong

Emeriti

Lamar Herrin

The Cornell English Department offers a full range of undergraduate-level courses in American literary history, from the colonial period to the present. Students also have the opportunity to broaden their understanding of the literary texts through courses in the interdisciplinary American Studies Program. Faculty strengths in American studies include genre studies, feminist criticism, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, and all of the major areas of ethnic American studies. The Cornell program in American literature is especially supportive of comparative and interdisciplinary work, across and among canonical and non-canonical, and ethnic and mainstream literatures. Graduate students form a strong and active cohort within the department, working in all aspects of American literary studies, from the early national period and Civil War and reform movements, through the study of regional contexts for realism and naturalism, and the international crises of modernism and global contact narratives, to African-American, Asian American, Latino and Latina, and Native American literatures.

The Ph.D. program benefits from the Cornell University Library’s extensive special collections in the field, including the nationally pre-eminent holdings on the history of gender, sexual identity, and family life in the Human Sexuality Collection. Other research strengths include materials from the Abolitionist movement, political documents in the Susan H. Douglas Collection of Political Americana, writings of reform leaders such as Lydia Maria Child and William Lloyd Garrison, the Lindseth Woman Suffrage Collection, documents from the U.S.A. peace movement and activists Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan and William Stringfellow, records of Japanese-American Relocation Centers, and collections on the history of theater, television, popular media, advertising, and material culture. Manuscript collections of American authors include papers of Diane Ackerman, A. R. Ammons, Paul Goodman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Wyndham Lewis, Alison Lurie, Jay McInerney, Vladimir Nabokov, George Jean Nathan, Gene Saks, Gary Snyder, E. B. White, and Ian Young.

Medieval Literary Studies

Faculty

Andrew Galloway

Thomas D. Hill

Masha Raskolnikov

Samantha Zacher

Emeriti

Carol Kaske

Winthrop Wetherbee

The Cornell English Department maintains a tradition of strength and innovation in the earlier historical periods of British literary studies. Undergraduates and graduates choose from a wide offering of courses in all the historical periods of early modern British literature, from Beowulf to Chaucer and beyond as well as widely around, including courses on Shakespeare at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. Faculty interests range from philological and cultural studies to feminist theory and queer theory, and from bibliographical and textual criticism to various forms of literary history models of formalist analysis. Graduate students specializing in the medieval period have the opportunity to study with a substantial cohort of students in other fields, especially through links with the active, interdisciplinary Ph.D.

Program in Medieval Studies: Such students also have at hand major and up-to-date library collections ofsources and critical studies in Old English, Middle English, Latin, and other medieval languages and literatures, in manuscript, print, and on-line form; the Cornell University library is noted for its special collections in Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic materials, the last--the Fiske Icelandic Collection--the largest outside of Iceland; and for its large microfilmed collections of medieval British literary and historical manuscripts.

Early Modern-18th Century British literary studies

Faculty

Fredric V. Bogel

Laura Brown

Cathy Caruth

Walter Cohen

Barbara Correll

Amanda Goldstein

Rayna Kalas

Philip Lorenz

Jenny Mann

Bernadette A. Meyler

Timothy Murray

Neil Saccamano

Nick Salvato

Harry E. Shaw

Emeriti

Barry Adams

For doctoral students specializing in the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, or undergraduates taking Shakespeare or writing senior theses on Ben Jonson, courses on such topics as drama, satire, aesthetic theory, race, gender, and colonialism all serve to provide entrees into a wide range of literary, aesthetic, philosophical, political, and cultural materials in these major centuries of English literature, or of linking these fields to prior or subsequent historical periods. Faculty interests range widely fromcultural and genre studies to feminist theory, legal studies, and various models of formalist analysis. For advanced studies and research, to supportsuch research and teaching, the Cornell University Library offers a complete set of the Shakespeare folios, and substantial holdings of sixteenth through eighteenth-century imprints tracing the evolution of religious dissent, thehistory of science and technology, and witchcraft. The collections also include the internationally renowned French Revolution Collection, nearly complete printed holdings of the works of Pope and Swift, and substantial representation of Defoe, Johnson, Burney, and others.

Nineteenth Century

Faculty

Cathy Caruth

Cynthia Chase

Elisha Cohn

J. Ellen Gainor

Roger Gilbert

Amanda Goldstein

Ellis Hanson

Satya Mohanty

Paul L. Sawyer

Harry E. Shaw

Emeriti

Dorothy Mermin

A. Reeve Parker

Sandra Siegel

In the more recent eras of British literary studies, a wide range of courses in the major periods and genres of nineteenth-century British literature is available to undergraduates. The Cornell English Department has been a center for major critical work in Romanticism throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and the Department is the home base for the Cornell University Press production of the complete works of William Wordsworth. The Cornell University Library’s William Wordsworth Collection is an internationally prominent collection, paralleling that of Dove Cottage, and including nearly comprehensive book holdings on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and related authors. The manuscript collection includes letters, manuscripts, broadsides, pictures, documents, and objects by, to, belonging to, or about Wordsworth and his family. Books by and about Wordsworth include all editions of his published works, books from his personal library, and works on the Lake District. Also included are manuscripts by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sara Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Robert Southey, Lord Byron, and John Keats. Faculty specializing in Romantic drama and poststructuralist analysis also encourage linkages with eighteenth century studies and Victorian studies. In Victorian literature, faculty offer advanced courses in narrative theory, gender and sexuality studies, and colonialism and cultural difference, while a large cohort of graduate students sponsors study groups on various topics, especially nineteenth-century fiction.

Twentieth Century British Literary Studies

Faculty

Kevin Attell

Molly Hite

Satya Mohanty

Daniel R. Schwarz

Faculty and graduate interests in the twentieth century include feminist and queer theory, formalist and narratological approaches, visual and cultural studies, canon formation and expansion, and political theory. Teaching and research explore how new social, gender, and psychoanalytic theories affected the literary productions of modernism. Classes and graduate reading groups often draw on the extensive manuscript and Rare Books holdings in Cornell’s Kroch Library, including major collections of Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Laura Riding Jackson materials; an array of Bloomsbury writings published by the Hogarth Press; the Human Sexuality collection; and the James Joyce Collection, a major repository of manuscripts, letters, documents, photographs, bound manuscripts, galley proofs, books, and broadsides by, to or about Joyce, including letters between Joyce and his lover Nora Barnacle, and some fifty letters from Ezra Pound.

Theory

Faculty

Elizabeth Anker

Kevin Attell

Fredric Bogel

Mary Pat Brady

Cathy Caruth

Cynthia Chase

Eric Cheyfitz

Barbara Correll

Jonathan Culler

Laura Donaldson

Grant Farred

Ellis Hanson

Natalie Melas

Satya Mohanty

Timothy Murray

Masha Raskolnikov

Neil Saccamano

Harry E. Shaw

Amy Villarejo

Shelley Wong

The term “theory” names a large and varied field of inquiry that can include texts in anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, geography, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and intellectual history, and sociology.

Jonathan Culler suggests that the main effect of theory is “the disputing of ‘common sense’: common-sense views about meaning, writing, literature, experience.” Noting that a historical construction may have “come to seem so natural to us that we don’t even see it as a theory,” he cites some questions that theory can address: “What is meaning? What is an author? What is it to read? What is the I or subject who writes, reads, or acts? How do texts relate to the circumstances in which they are produced?”

English faculty offer introductory course on theory at the undergraduate and graduate level. Students can pursue further intensive study in courses emphasizing Marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and narrative theories and cultural studies. Strong faculty interests in cultural difference, queer theory, feminist criticism and gender studies, postcolonial theory and psychoanalytic theory inform many graduate courses. Some Ph.D. students may choose to specialize in theory and define dissertation topics focusing on particular theoretical paradigms. Others may combine their theoretical interests with approaches to literary or other cultural materials.

Cornell is the home of the School of Criticism and Theory, in session over the summer, where English Department graduate students may study intensively a range of theoretical topics in seminars taught by major scholars invited from all over the world.

Interdisciplinary Affiliations

» Africana Studies

Faculty: Carole Boyce Davies, Margo Crawford, Dagmawi Woubhset, Mukoma Wa Ngugi

» American Indian Program

Faculty: Mary Pat Brady, Eric Cheyfitz, Laura Donaldson, Kate McCullough, Shelly Wong, Dagmawi Woubshet

» American Studies Program

Faculty: Eric Cheyfitz, Shirley Samuels

» Asian American Studies Program

Faculty: Shelley Wong

» Comparative Literature Department

Faculty: Cynthia Chase, Jonathan Culler, Timothy Murray, Neil Saccamano

» Department of Art History

Faculty: Shirley Samuels

» Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

Faculty: Jane Juffer, Kate McCullough

» Latino/a Studies Program

Faculty: Mary Pat Brady, Ella Diaz, Ernesto Quiñonez, Helena Viramontes

» Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Program

Faculty: Barbara Correll, Ellis Hanson, Kate McCullough, Timothy Murray, Masha Raskolnikov

» Medieval Studies Program

Faculty: Andrew Galloway, Thomas D. Hill, Masha Raskolnikov, Samantha Zacher

» Performing and Media Arts

Faculty: Ellis Hanson, Phil Lorenz, Timothy Murray

» Visual Studies

Faculty: Timothy Murray, Shirley Samuels