Rutgers English Department News
The English Department welcomed award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates as a Visiting Distinguished Professor for the Spring of 2020.
Congratulations to Richard Dienst and Rebecca Walkowitz who were honored with 2019-2020 Faculty Year-End Awards. These awards honor outstanding members of the Rutgers community selected by their colleagues for exceptional contributions to teaching, research, or public service through a program of eight awards. For each award, the recipient receives a commemorative certificate and an honorarium.
Update April 15, 2020
Dear Staff, Faculty, and Students,
Things are changing all around us, and I am thinking of you and all that you are managing for yourself and others while heroically continuing to support our mission as educators. In the coming days and weeks, we are likely to encounter greater difficulties individually and collectively. We don't need to face those difficulties on our own, and I want to encourage you to ask for relief and support if you need it.
Faculty, staff, and students mourn the loss of our beloved colleague Cheryl Wall, Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English, who was a leading voice in the field of African-American literature, a generous mentor to so many, and an institution builder at Rutgers and beyond.
Ann Jurecic's course "Introduction to Health, Medicine, and Literature" that explores themes of illness and disease through major literary works, took on more significance to students this semester. They discuss real-life events reflecting on the course material in this article Pandemic Provides Chilling Confirmation for Students Studying the Literature of Illness.
The Rutgers English Department is delighted to report that Evie Shockley has been honored yet again, this time with the 2018 prestigious Hurston/Wright award for her collection semiautomatic.
Photos from the marathon reading of Matilda at Rutgers Day, April 28, 2018. It was a huge success, and this year proved to be one of our busiest marathon readings yet. Even the Rutgers New Brunswick Chancellor himself, Debasish Dutta, stopped by to take a turn reading.
Special thanks to Alex Dawson for supplying us with the coolest and most unique table decorations--all Matilda/Roald Dahl themed of course. It was a truly special day...
Lynda Dexheimer, assistant director, Department of English, School of Arts and Sciences, was recognized for her leadership in the writing program, including her curriculum design and mentoring, and her excellence in teaching and creating an inclusive and nurturing learning environment for students.
A statement by Evie Shockley's colleague, Distinguished Professor Mark Doty, about Professor Shockley's work:
Although it’s not a surprise to find wonderful scholars and writers in the English Department at Rutgers, it’s still a remarkable gift to have a colleague like Evie Shockley, whose third full collection of poems, semiautomatic, was one of three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Professor Elin Diamond, an internationally-recognized scholar of comparative drama and formerly Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature, has won the 2017 Geoffrey Marshall Mentoring Award granted by the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools.
Stéphane Robolin received the 2017 African Literature Association First Book Award for Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing (Illinois University Press).
Cheryl Wall received the inaugural Octavia E. Butler Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship on Black Women Writers, presented at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association Conference in Boston, MA, May 26 2017.
Henry Turner has won The Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award, given in alternate years to the best recent book in English Renaissance studies, for his book The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651.
Dear Colleagues,
On November 5, 2017, our former colleague and chair Thomas F. Van Laan died in San Diego, CA. He was 86. Tom taught in the Department of English at Rutgers for thirty-five years, arriving soon after earning his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1961. He was Chair from 1983 to 1989.
Whereas the faculty of the department of English are committed to making the university a just and inclusive community,
Whereas President Barchi has publicly declared, on December 8, 2016, that “Rutgers is, and will always be, a sanctuary,” committing to protecting the rights of undocumented students by refusing record-sharing and physical access to federal immigration enforcement except as required by court order, warrant, or subpoena,
- Ann Coiro has been awarded the Milton Society's Irene Samuel Memorial Award
- Sandy Flitterman-Lewis gives Keynote Address
- Evie Shockley received the 2015 Stephen Henderson Award
- Doug Jones awarded Frank and Eleanor Griffiths Chair
- Evie Shockley has been awarded a Rutgers Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award for 2013-2014.