Welcome
The English Department at the University of Georgia is a diverse scholarly community of over 40 faculty, 80 graduate teaching assistants, 120 graduate students, and more than 500 undergraduate majors and minors held together by a common commitment to preserving, transmitting, and extending the rich cultural legacy of the English language. At the core of our discipline lie the complex skills of reading and writing, and though these can be productively applied to a wide range of professional goals in the sciences, in the arts, in business or in government our own work as scholars and teachers strives to expand and to deepen our understanding of the critical and creative imagination.
A sympathetic participation in the verbal worlds of other times and places, drawing on the full range of linguistic tools, historical knowledge, and interpretive experience at our disposal, allows our students to enhance their appreciation for expressive possibility. The diversity of the faculty's research interests, teaching philosophies, and scholarly methods helps ensure that an English major at the University of Georgia develops a sophisticated, practical grasp of the central role that language plays in the creation and preservation of a vibrant cultural community.
 Saturday , November 07 (10:00 AM) Beyond the Movement: Global and Contemporary Freedom Struggles This three-day symposium (Saturday Nov. 7 through Monday Nov. 9) honors the accomplishments of Georgia's civil rights activists and considers the global and national legacies of the Movement since its classic years of the 1950s and 1960s. Events will include a keynote lecture by the historian, commentator, and activist Dr. Peniel E. Joseph, author of the critically acclaimed book -Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A History of Black Power In America- (2006) and professor of History at Tufts University. Historians Chana Kai Lee of UGA and Jelani Cobb of Spelman College will join filmmaker and UGA alumnus Hadjii to discuss intergenerational connections and divergences. The symposium will also feature a multidisciplinary panel discussion by UGA civil rights scholars and Athens activists, and an on-stage panel discussion with activists from Southwest Georgia's influential Albany and Americus Movements. The event culminates with an evening of poetry and music at Ciné featuring local elementary school students sharing the stage with Prof. Reginald McKnight of the UGA Creative Writing Program, Prof. Sharan Strange of Spelman College, and Prof. Jeffrey Lamar Coleman of St. Mary's College of Maryland. All events are free and open to the public, and will take place primarily in the UGA Chapel and Georgia Center for Continuing Education. For further information please contact the UGA Institute for African American Studies (706.542.5197). Tuesday , November 10 (04:00 PM) Thesis Presentation: The Skeleton Keyhole When: Tuesday, Nov. 10, 4pm-6pm Where: Park Hall room 265 What: Senior Seth McKelvey presents his undergraduate Honors Thesis, The Skeleton Keyhole. Seth will give a short discussion of his poetics, read from his work, play recordings of the collaborations, and possibly perform a few of the musical collaborations live. Also reading to open up the event will be Chelsea Rice, Laura Leidner, Chris O'Rourke, and Nathan Brand. Free snacks and refreshments! Additional Info: The project attempts to resolve the difficulties of contemporary experimental poetry with didactic and populist desires through the accessibility afforded by music. Acknowledging the shortcomings of a finite and therefore deficient language, the poet reaches out to music as a surrogate voice in an effort to overcome, or at least recognize, the limitations of poetry. Rather than a push against such limitations into further degrees of openness, however, it is a push for accessibility, an attempt to move beyond poetry's unavoidable constraints of audience. The result is a collection of poetry-music collaborations with a number of local musicians including Chelsea Rice and Tuna Fortuna (Rice will also be reading from her own poetry at the event). The collaborative effort moves beyond a simple setting of the poem, pushing to such an extent that the lines between poetry and music are blurred almost to the point of song; the poems as they are heard with the music are different works entirely from those poems on the page. The sounds range from spaced-out prog rock to a twanging banjo over a syncopated thump, all in an effort to create an anchor by which one may latch onto abnormally difficult and obscure poetry. Tuesday , November 10 (08:00 PM) VOX Reading: John Woods Fiction Writer John Woods will return to UGA on November 10, to read at CINE at 8 PM as part of this year's VOX Reading Series. Wednesday, November 11 (12:05 PM) Advisory Committee Meeting The Advisory Committee to the Head of the English Department will meet in Park 261 at 12.05 pm. Thursday , November 12 (07:00 PM) Poetry reading: Ed Roberson Poet Ed Roberson will read from his work. Born in 1939 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Roberson has published eight volumes of poetry, the most recent of which are The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse, 2009) and City Eclogue (Atelos, 2006). His collection Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; his book Atmosphere Conditions was a winner of the National Poetry Series and was nominated for the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Award. He is a recipient of the Lila Wallace Writers' Award and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award. Retired from Rutgers University, he currently lives in Chicago, where he has taught at Columbia College, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. Sponsored by the Lanier Chair. Free and open to the public. Please address any questions to Jed Rasula (rasulaj@uga.edu) or Andrew Zawacki (zawacki@uga.edu).
Tuesday , November 17 (08:00 PM) VOX Reading: Kate Greenstreet & Brigitte Byrd Poets Kate Greenstreet & Brigitte Byrd will be reading on November 17 at CINE at 8 PM as part of this year's VOX Reading Series. Wednesday, November 18 (12:05 PM) Faculty meeting The faculty of the English department will meet at 12.05 pm in Room 144. Wednesday, November 25 (12:00 AM) University-wide furlough In order to save the University money at a time of financial crisis, staff and faculty at the University of Georgia (including the English department) will be on furlough (mandatory unpaid leave) today. Happy Thanksgiving! Wednesday, December 02 (12:05 PM) Advisory Committee Meeting The Advisory Committee to the Head will meet at 12.05 pm in Room 261. |  |
  Christy Desmet and Anne Williams Shakespearean Gothic This collection of essays explores the thesis that Shakespeare, as we know him today, was born in the eighteenth century, at the same time as the Gothic tradition, first named by Horace Walpole in 1764. The two are inextricable. Writers interested in pursuing ‘Gothic’ themes and forms (the supernatural events and generic hybrids decried by French neoclassicism) justified their aesthetic choices as following the example of their great – and emphatically English – precursor. They cited him in their epigraphs and appropriated his narratives. They echoed his language and imitated his dramatic devices. Like Shakespeare, they explored the ways in which familial ghosts may haunt the present. Like him, they mixed modes and genres: tragedy and comedy, verse and prose. Together, critics of Shakespeare and creators of the Gothic (often one and the same author) not only canonized England’s secular saint and created a new literary mode; they collectively initiated a mode of subjectivity that remains with us today in both high and popular culture. |
  Study in Cortona in the Spring
ENGL3300, Women in Literature. English Poetesses; Italian Art
The Study Abroad Program in Cortona invites applications from juniors and seniors, as well as from sophomores with solid credentials. |