It was another busy year for the English department, filled with learning, creating, and intellectual exchange. We welcomed our second Blackburn Distinguished Artist-in-Residence, the poet Frances Leviston, who gave a reading of her work, taught a popular course on “Poetry and Photography,” and co-organized a working group on “Words and Pics” with Prof. Mesha Maren. The creative writing program also organized a very successful Blackburn Festival, featuring three brilliant fiction writers, Rachel Kushner, Claire Messud, and Paul Yoon. The second annual Armstrong-Tennenhouse lecture was delivered by Professor Julius Fleming of Washington University.
We celebrated our colleagues Professor Taylor Black and Professor Jarvis McInnis’s promotion to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. Professor Black’s book, Style: A Queer Cosmology, was published in 2023, and Professor McInnis’s book, Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South, is out in May 2025. We look forward to welcoming four new colleagues next year: Professor Richard So specializes in Computational Literary Studies; Professor Marguerite Nguyen specializes in Asian American Literature; and Professor Timothy Heimlich specializes in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. The novelist Camille Bordas will also join us as the third Blackburn Distinguished Artist-in-Residence.
Thanks, everyone, for a year filled with scholarship and collegiality! Have a great summer, and we’ll see you in the Allen building at the end of August.