Areas of Study

Creative Writing

Faculty

Alice Fulton

Phyllis Janowitz

Michael Koch

J. Robert Lennon

Ken McClane

Maureen McCoy

Robert Morgan

Ernesto Quiñonez

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Stephanie Vaughn

Helena Maria Viramontes

Emeritus

Lamar Herrin

Alison Lurie

Dan McCall

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

Mary Pat Brady

Eric Cheyfitz

Laura Donaldson

Grant Farred

Kenneth McClane

Satya Mohanty

Helena Viramontes

Shelley Wong

Dagmawi Woubshet

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

Debra Fried

Roger Gilbert

Molly Hite

Phyllis Janowitz

Laura Donaldson

Kate McCullough

Jonathan Monroe

Robert R. Morgan

Shirley Samuels

Shelley Wong

Emeritus

Dan E. McCall

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 and Early Modern British literary studies

Faculty

Fredric V. Bogel

Laura Brown

Walter Cohen

Barbara Correll

Andrew Galloway

Thomas D. Hill

Rayna Kalas

Carol Kaske

Philip Lorenz

Jenny Mann

Timothy Murray

Masha Raskolnikov

Carin Ruff

Neil Saccamano

Harry E. Shaw

Samantha Zacher

Emeritus

Winthrop Wetherbee

The Cornell English Department maintains a tradition of strength and innovation in the earlier historical periods of British literary studies. Undergraduates choose from a full offering of courses in all the historical periods of early modern British literature, including courses on Shakespeare at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. Faculty interests range widely from cultural studies and political criticism to feminist theory and queer theory, and from bibliographical and textual criticism to various 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, 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 of sources 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 especially noted for its large array of microfilmed collections of medieval British literary and historical manuscripts, and for its special collections in Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic materials, the last--the Fiske Icelandic Collection--the largest outside of Iceland.

For doctoral students specializing in the Renaissance and the eighteenth-century, courses on such topics as drama, satire, aesthetic theory, race, gender, and colonialism serve as a means of focusing in on specific literary, aesthetic, philosophical, political, or cultural materials, or of linking these fields to prior or subsequent historical periods. For advanced studies and research, the Cornell University Library offers a complete set of the Shakespeare folios, and substantial holdings of sixteenth-century imprints tracing the evolution of religious dissent, the history 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. The aim of the Ph.D. program in Medieval and early modern British literary studies is to provide students with an exposure to the most innovative work in these areas, while building a strong basis in language, history, and literary history.

Nineteenth Century

Faculty

James Eli Adams

Cynthia Chase

Roger Gilbert

Ellis Hanson

Satya Mohanty

A. Reeve Parker

Paul L. Sawyer

Harry E. Shaw

Sandra Siegel

Emerita

Dorothy Mermin

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

Jonathan Monroe

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

Kevin Attell

Fredric Bogel

Mary Pat Brady

Cynthia Chase

Eric Cheyfitz

Barbara Correll

Jonathan Culler

Laura Donaldson

Grant Farred

Ellis Hanson

Satya Mohanty

Timothy Murray

Masha Raskolnikov

Neil Saccamano

Harry E. Shaw

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

» Latino/a Studies Program

Faculty: Mary Pat Brady, Ernesto Quiñonez, Helena Viramontes

» Comparative Literature Department

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

» American Indian Program

Faculty: Eric Cheyfitz, Laura Donaldson

» American Studies Program

Faculty: Eric Cheyfitz, Shirley Samuels

» Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Program

Faculty: Barbara Correll, Jonathan Culler, Ellis Hanson

» Medieval Studies Program

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

» Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

Faculty: Kate McCullough

» Visual Studies

Faculty: Timothy Murray, Shirley Samuels

» Department of Art History

Faculty: Shirley Samuels

» Asian American Studies Program

Faculty: Shelley Wong