In my note from the chair last Fall (another lifetime ago it seems), I recounted the collective self-assessment and future planning that we had undertaken as a department the year before. At the time, I noted how it will be up to us to create the future we hope to have. It is tempting now, amid a global pandemic that has disrupted nearly every aspect of our lives, to confirm the futility of planning for a future that ultimately is always unpredictable. But more than ever it is clear to me… Read more
Professor Juan Guerra is retiring. Below his close colleague, English Department chair Anis Bawarshi, pays tribute to the ephemeral specialness and to the concrete certainty of a remarkable legacy left in Language, Literacy, Rhetoric and Composition. English Matters advises you to take a moment for this warm homage to a great contributor to our campus community and beyond. Thank you Anis, and congratulations Juan!
Writing this retirement tribute to my dear friend and colleague,… Read more
The English Department welcomes to our ranks three new faculty colleagues this Fall. Catherine Cole, Divisional Dean of The Arts, Professor of Dance, and specialist in African dance and arts, has moved half of her faculty line into English. We are also fortunate to welcome two new faculty hires: Douglas S. Ishii, a scholar of Asian American Literature and… Read more
Kristen Millares Young (MFA ’12) is the current Prose Writer-in-Resident at Hugo House. She is the author of Subduction, published by Red Hen Press in April 2020, a lyric retelling of the troubled history of encounter in the Americas. Ms. Magazine called the book an… Read more
Professor Edward Alexander, 1936-2020
English Matters thanks Professor Emeritus Joe Butwin for composing the following touching tribute to his recently passed good friend Professor Emeritus Edward Alexander. A superb scholar, teacher and colleague, Professor Alexander will be missed. Rest in peace.… Read more
Graduate:
English department graduate students Nanya Jhingran and BrittNEY Frantece were awarded a Mellon Collaborative Summer Fellowship for Public Projects in the Humanities for their collaborative project, “Manifesting the Ecstatic: Spiritual Activism & Storytelling in Seattle Communities of Color.” Nanya and BrittNEY will be working with their faculty advisors… Read more
Faculty and Staff News
First a bit of great program news.
GradReports.com has ranked the UW English department MFA program #1 in the country based on median early-career salary. This data was drawn from surveys of over 5 million graduates conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's higher ed information resource, College Scorecard. The University of Washington’s MFA… Read more
The Novel Coronavirus is affecting people and institutions worldwide. The UW English department is obviously no exception. Our most major adjustment last spring quarter (and once again this fall quarter) has been teaching a full catalog of classes remotely. The English department’s response to this massive, short-order change has been impressively careful, ethical, and effective. It’s truly been an “all hands on deck” situation. And, to a person, the English Department has shown up topside… Read more
This past winter it was announced that the College of Arts and Sciences would undertake a major reorganization of humanities undergraduate advising. All departmental undergraduate advising has since been consolidated into an integrated humanities undergraduate advising center called Humanities Academic Services, which will be fully operational in fall of 2020.
Although we are extremely fortunate that Dr. Nancy Sisko, the English department’s Director of Advising, has accepted a position as… Read more
Retirement Announcement: Nikolai Popov
English Matters applauds the noteworthy career of retiring Senior Lecturer Nikolai Povov. Popov is a Bulgarian academic, writer, and translator who defected to the US in the mid 80s. He translated James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Bulgarian, and introduced and/or edited translations into Bulgarian of novels of Tobias Smollett, Henry James,… Read more
This past year Professor Shawn Wong has seen much well-deserved interest in the press around a new edition of 1974’s brash, canon-establishing Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers, and for his grassroots defense of the Okada family’s rights to… Read more