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Charlotte the Spider and the entire English department send our best wishes to all of our graduating students!
Charlotte the Spider and the entire English department send our best wishes to all of our graduating students!
Please join us in celebrating the English Department’s graduating University Scholars! Lauren Baskin ‘24 (CLAS), Katherine Jimenez ‘24 (CLAS), and Rylee Thomas ‘24 (CLAS) have come a long way during their time as UConn English students, and their University Scholar projects reflect their individual skills and passions. Swipe to read about them!
Congratulations, Lauren, Katherine, and Rylee—we’re proud of you 💙🤍
Please join us in celebrating the English Department’s graduating University Scholars! Lauren Baskin ‘24 (CLAS), Katherine Jimenez ‘24 (CLAS), and Rylee Thomas ‘24 (CLAS) have come a long way during their time as UConn English students, and their University Scholar projects reflect their individual skills and passions. Swipe to read about them!
Congratulations, Lauren, Katherine, and Rylee—we’re proud of you 💙🤍
As National Poetry Month enters its final days, please take the time to enjoy the first stanza of “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye.
“Kindness,” featured in the 1995 collection “Words Under the Words: Selected Poems,” is one of Nye’s most iconic poems, exploring the meaning of kindness, the contexts in which it exists, and how it reaches us. In a 2023 Poetry Northwest interview, Nye explained how the poem found her:
I’d always been a person who believed that if you were in a really bad place, you just needed to get very, very quiet and listen, and maybe ask a question into the air. Maybe some people would call it meditating, some would call it praying, beseeching, but you needed to quiet your mind. I heard this poem, and I heard it in this woman’s voice being spoken to me. I pulled that little notebook out. I wrote it down, as I heard it. I felt like a scribe in that moment. It was like nothing can get in the way of my copying this poem down right now, that’s what I’m here to do. After I finished writing the full draft, maybe two lines changed. Only a few words in them changed. Basically, I copied it down verbatim. I stood up, took a breath, put that notebook back in my pocket, felt as if a gift had been given, I had been there to receive it. Suddenly, I knew two things that I could do to survive at that moment. I could figure out how to carry on.
Quote: Poetry Northwest
Photo: Sergio Flores.
As National Poetry Month enters its final days, please take the time to enjoy the first stanza of “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye.
“Kindness,” featured in the 1995 collection “Words Under the Words: Selected Poems,” is one of Nye’s most iconic poems, exploring the meaning of kindness, the contexts in which it exists, and how it reaches us. In a 2023 Poetry Northwest interview, Nye explained how the poem found her:
I’d always been a person who believed that if you were in a really bad place, you just needed to get very, very quiet and listen, and maybe ask a question into the air. Maybe some people would call it meditating, some would call it praying, beseeching, but you needed to quiet your mind. I heard this poem, and I heard it in this woman’s voice being spoken to me. I pulled that little notebook out. I wrote it down, as I heard it. I felt like a scribe in that moment. It was like nothing can get in the way of my copying this poem down right now, that’s what I’m here to do. After I finished writing the full draft, maybe two lines changed. Only a few words in them changed. Basically, I copied it down verbatim. I stood up, took a breath, put that notebook back in my pocket, felt as if a gift had been given, I had been there to receive it. Suddenly, I knew two things that I could do to survive at that moment. I could figure out how to carry on.
Quote: Poetry Northwest
Photo: Sergio Flores.
Please join us in congratulating Professor of Africana Studies and English Martha Cutter for receiving the 2024 MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award!
MELUS, the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and Professor Cutter have a long history, and this award recognizes both her scholarly accomplishments and her dedication to MELUS.
We’re proud to have such esteemed faculty as you, Professor Cutter 🩷
Please join us in congratulating Professor of Africana Studies and English Martha Cutter for receiving the 2024 MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award!
MELUS, the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and Professor Cutter have a long history, and this award recognizes both her scholarly accomplishments and her dedication to MELUS.
We’re proud to have such esteemed faculty as you, Professor Cutter 🩷
Congratulations to Professor of English Anna Mae Duane and Professor of Political Science Stephen Dyson, who have been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grant for their project, “Bringing the Past to the Future: Slavery and Artificial Intelligence on the Battleground of Popular Culture”!
The project involves the “development of a podcast series and scholarly book chapters
analyzing how persistent narratives of slavery and servitude have influenced popular
understanding of artificial intelligence and humans’ ethical engagement with emerging
technologies,” according to its official description.
Well done, Professors Duane and Dyson—we’re looking forward to seeing how your project progresses 🤍
Congratulations to Professor of English Anna Mae Duane and Professor of Political Science Stephen Dyson, who have been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grant for their project, “Bringing the Past to the Future: Slavery and Artificial Intelligence on the Battleground of Popular Culture”!
The project involves the “development of a podcast series and scholarly book chapters
analyzing how persistent narratives of slavery and servitude have influenced popular
understanding of artificial intelligence and humans’ ethical engagement with emerging
technologies,” according to its official description.
Well done, Professors Duane and Dyson—we’re looking forward to seeing how your project progresses 🤍
We’d like to congratulate Jonathan Merola for successfully defending his dissertation, “‘The Good Pelican’: Forms and Figures of Twentieth-and Twenty-First Century American Catholic Fiction,” last Friday!
Well done, Jonathan! We wish you the best with your future endeavors 💚
We’d like to congratulate Jonathan Merola for successfully defending his dissertation, “‘The Good Pelican’: Forms and Figures of Twentieth-and Twenty-First Century American Catholic Fiction,” last Friday!
Well done, Jonathan! We wish you the best with your future endeavors 💚
April is National Poetry Month! In celebration, we’re highlighting “So to Speak” by Terrance Hayes, our 58th Wallace Stevens Poet.
Some follow the “rules” rigidly; Hayes, on the other hand, uses his poetry to play with those rules—to work with and around them to his liking. In his July 2023 appearance on “All Things Considered,” he explained his relationship with formal poetic rules:
Well, I do like bending rules, so I`m very aware. And I say in my teaching to my students about bending the rules so that we know that there was a rule to be broken. Otherwise, it`s anarchy. For me, in the sonnet form, it`s that volta - the idea that you`re going to have to change your mind at some point if you know sort of psychologically how the sonnet`s set up. So I think about that as an American. You know, we would never have just one volta `cause, for us, it`s just going to be constant changes - from Black presidents to whatever follows Black presidents, from crazy weather to beautiful weather - you know, just turn - constantly a kind of turning is how I think of the volta in an American sonnet.
Quote: NPR
Photo: Blue Flower Arts.
April is National Poetry Month! In celebration, we’re highlighting “So to Speak” by Terrance Hayes, our 58th Wallace Stevens Poet.
Some follow the “rules” rigidly; Hayes, on the other hand, uses his poetry to play with those rules—to work with and around them to his liking. In his July 2023 appearance on “All Things Considered,” he explained his relationship with formal poetic rules:
Well, I do like bending rules, so I`m very aware. And I say in my teaching to my students about bending the rules so that we know that there was a rule to be broken. Otherwise, it`s anarchy. For me, in the sonnet form, it`s that volta - the idea that you`re going to have to change your mind at some point if you know sort of psychologically how the sonnet`s set up. So I think about that as an American. You know, we would never have just one volta `cause, for us, it`s just going to be constant changes - from Black presidents to whatever follows Black presidents, from crazy weather to beautiful weather - you know, just turn - constantly a kind of turning is how I think of the volta in an American sonnet.
Quote: NPR
Photo: Blue Flower Arts.
Today, we’d like to congratulate Professor Frederick Roden for winning the 2024 UConn-AAUP Excellence Award for Teaching Excellence (Career)! Wonderful work, Professor Roden—we’re proud to have such awesome faculty in our Department 💚
Today, we’d like to congratulate Professor Frederick Roden for winning the 2024 UConn-AAUP Excellence Award for Teaching Excellence (Career)! Wonderful work, Professor Roden—we’re proud to have such awesome faculty in our Department 💚