Upcoming Events

English Institute, Fall 2009

Northeastern's English department is a sponsor of the 68th annual English Institute, which will take place at the Barker Center, Harvard University, September 11-13. The topic is "Genre," and featured speakers will include Jonathan Culler, Wai Chee Dimock, Alex Woloch, and others.

Preregistration is only $20 for faculty and students and includes a Friday evening reception. For more information, please visit www.fas.harvard.edu/~englinst or contact Laura Green.

More English Department events

Message from the Chair

Welcome to the Department of English at Northeastern University!

We are a very active community of teachers, students, scholars, and writers. Our interests span Literary and Cultural Studies; Film Studies; Linguistics; and Writing, including Creative Writing as well as Rhetoric and Composition.

Please take the time to explore our many undergraduate and graduate programs described here. These help prepare students for careers in teaching and research, advertising and publishing, law and public relations, radio and television � really any field in which communication and critical judgment go hand in hand.

Faculty Spotlight

Excellence in Teaching Award

The department congratulates Professor Guy Rotella, winner of a 2009 university Excellence in Teaching Award. Professor Rotella has been a member of the department since 1985, teaching courses in Modern and postmodern British and American poetry and directing doctoral dissertations in these fields. His most recent scholarly book is Castings: Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney.

English Professor Elizabeth Dillon is featured in a College of Arts and Sciences podcast in which professors discuss the special advantages of studying the Liberal Arts at Northeastern. Watch the podcast here.

Recent News

English Department Graduates

On Thursday, April 30th, the department celebrated commencement at a lunch reception for graduating majors and their relatives and friends. A brief program highlighted English majors' ways with words: Suzanne Igarteburu, with the highest GPA in the major, and Matt Zahnzinger, with the second, shared valedictory remarks ; Mr. Zahnzinger also performed the tongue-twisting "Museum Song" from the musical Barnum, and Allison Mosho shared poems written for Ellen Noonan's Poetry Workshop.

The department congratulates Michael Baulier, MacFarland Scholar and one of NU's 100 Most Influential Seniors; Peter Franklin, NU Leadership Scholar, Kathleen Gillis, winner of an NU Compass Award, S, Laura O'Regan, winner of the 2009 Peter Burton Hanson Prize in Scholarly Writing, and over seventy more new B.A.s in English!

For photos from the event, click here.

The department congratulates Tiffany Conroy, winner of a Dissertation Writing Fellowship for Summer 2009. This competitve university fellowship supports doctoral students in the final semester of writing. Ms. Conroy, who also holds a Certificate in Cinema Studies, expects to complete and defend her dissertation (directed by Professor Harlow Robinson, Department of Modern Languages and Cinema Studies Program) in August 2009.

On April 3, Ben Leubner successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, "The Limits of My Language: Wittgenstein and Contemporary American Poetry."

He'll take his Ph.D. at the May 1 commencement. Come fall, he'll be teaching in the English department at Montana State University at Bozeman. Ben's essay on Wittgenstein and Jorie Graham has just been accepted for publication in Twentieth-Century Literature.