University of Minnesota
Department of English
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Department of English

Welcome to the Department of English

The scholarship and other creative work and teaching of English faculty cover a broad range that includes literature, language, creative writing, literacy and rhetorical studies, linguistics and cultural inquiry, as well as the theories and documents that inform and critique these disciplines. Based on the study and practice of writing and speech, the explorations of histories and cultures, and the examination of languages, literatures, and aesthetics, our scope is international and our approach is interdisciplinary.

News & Announcements

  • Baxter Receives Rea Award

    Image of Charles BaxterEdelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter has won the 2011 Rea Award for the Short Story, given annually to a living American or Canadian writer whose published work has made a "significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form." The Rea Award honors writers "for originality and influence on the genre," rather than any one collection or story. Baxter receives $30,000 and joins a list of acclaimed honorees including Alice Munro, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, and John Updike. The jurors this year were Lorrie Moore, Stuart Dybeck, and Bill Henderson. Baxter's latest book, the 2011 Gryphon: New & Selected Stories, was noted in the jurors' citation, which reads in part: "Charles Baxter is a writer of elegant sentences, an expert in the mechanics of dramatic narration, and a master of psychological exile, which is the unexotic but special terrain of the short story."

     05/14/12

  • New Faculty Books

    Sheil She Hath Been Reading cover imageStart your summer reading now! Associate Professor Katherine Scheil this spring published She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (Cornell University Press, 2012), a fascinating look at how book clubs provided encouragement for female literary education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and a path into public life. This is Professor Scheil's third book. In May, Professor Julie Schumacher publishes her fifth book for younger readers, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (Delacorte, 2012). She won a 2007 Minnesota Book Award for her novel The Book of One Hundred Truths.

     05/08/12

  • Students Receive Research Support

    Two PhD candidates were awarded Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships for 2012-13: Sunyoung Ahn (adviser: Tim Brennan) and Will Kanyusik (adviser: Siobhan Craig). In addition, six PhD and MFA candidates received financial support this summer through the Graduate Research Partnership Program: Sunyoung Ahn (advised by Tim Brennan), Sally Franson (Charles Baxter), Andrew Marzoni (Siobhan Craig), Caitlin McHugh (Katherine Scheil), Trenton Olson (Andy Elfenbein), and Kerry Voigt (Ray Gonzalez). In addition, the MFA program awarded CLA research/travel fellowships to Aaron Apps, Christine Friedlander, and Flor Lauria, while the PhD program awarded short-term research grants to Wes Burdine, Andrew Marzoni, and Davu Seru. Congratulations to all!

     05/08/12

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