News & Events
Letter from the Chair
Along with many of you, I was disturbed by the recent decision by the Trump administration to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, effective this past March. Given that there are about 650 undocumented students enrolled at Hunter, many of whom are English majors, this action has an impact on all of us.
Our mission in the Hunter English department is to share this country’s rich inheritance of literature, and to provide a space for students to explore that heritage together. We know that poetry, fiction, drama, creative nonfiction, literary criticism, graphic novels — written expression in many forms — open up unfamiliar places, cultivate a curiosity about the world, and reward a rich and nuanced understanding of the past and the present, as well as speculating about the future. The fellowship that literary study generates crosses borders and spans history.
Given the intellectual generosity and radical openness inherent to literary study, this most recent change in policy towards DACA goes against our values as scholars, teachers, and mentors. And Hunter College shares those values. Last semester, the Hunter College Senate passed a resolution declaring the college a sanctuary campus. As President Raab wrote in her letter to the college community (posted on the Hunter website), undocumented students have access to funds from the Grove Fund, one of the few foundations that specifically supports DACA students. Student Affairs can connect students to counseling services and financial assistance, and other resources.
Right now it is hard to know what will happen when March rolls around. But I do know that we, your teachers and advisors, will be here to support you, listen to you, and advocate for you. And we encourage you to speak to us. As Audre Lorde, one of Hunter’s greatest graduates and faculty members, wrote "“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”
Finally, this is your department, so feel free to drop by my open hours: Monday 3-5pm, Tuesday 9am-12pm, Thursday 1-4pm, and by appointment.
Wishing you a productive and gratifying semester,
Sarah Chinn
Welcome to the department's new Blanche Colton Williams Lounge:
Faculty News & Accomplishments
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Check out at this exciting and insightful new book on the dynamics of the English Classroom by our very own English instructor, Robert Eidelberg: Staying After School. |
We encourage you to read Professor Allen Strouse's recent Inside Higher Ed article, titled "Why We Need Greater Linguistic Diversity"
Erika Luckert, adjunct lecturer of composition in the English Department, has won the 2017 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest. A reading by the winners will be held on May 8, 2017 at 8pm at the 92Y, Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, Buttenwieser Hall: $10 admission.
Professor Meena Alexander has recently published an interesting article in a special edition of PMLA on 'Literature in the World,' titled "Phenomenology of Passage."
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The Caribbean Philosophical Association has awarded Professor Jeremy Glick with The Nicolas Guillen Philosophical Literature Prize for his book The Black Radical Tragic. |
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We are proud to announce that Professor Angela Reyes has won the 2016 Edward Sapir Book Prize of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) for her book Discourse Analysis: Beyond the Speech Event. The Sapir Book Prize "is awarded to a book that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes."
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Congratulations to Professor Leigh Jones who has published her book titled,
From Boys to Men: Rhetorics of Emergent American Masculinity, to great praise. “From Boys to Men offers an accessible, engaging, richly detailed rhetorical history |
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Congratulations to Professor Jeremy Glick on the success of his new book, The Black Radical Tragic:
Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. Political philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has written a compelling and |
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“What I discovered was how colonialism really affected us — |
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Congratulations to Professor Paul McPherron whose book Cat Got Your Tongue? Teaching Idioms to English Learners, co-written with Patrick T. Randolph, is a bestseller for TESOL Press.
Praise for Cat Got Your Tongue? "It is clear that McPherron and Randolph truly wish to impart to their readers all of their |
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Poet and Creative Writing intructor Davida Singer has published her new collection of poetry,
naked romance and then some. Praise for naked romance and then some: "Davida Singer is a love gangster, a trickster. Writing in her honey drawl for all she’s worth. |
Student News & Accomplishments
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Congratulations to Hunter English alumnus, Leopoldine Core, who received
the 2015 Whiting Award for Fiction for her story collection, When Watched, which has just been published by Penguin Books. |
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It is an honor to announce that former Hunter Creative Writing student,
Ruby Huston-Ellenberg, debuted her play, Eve and her Neighbors, at the Summer 2016 FringeNYC: New York International Fringe Festival. |
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"Intense and savagely beautiful, Latifah Salom’s The Cake House grabs you, “Reading The Cake House, I vividly saw the whole edifice rising up |
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“When I came back from war, one of the things that |