A Letter From the Department Chair

It is my delight to serve as the Chair of the English Department at Temple University. Home to a thriving undergraduate major, a rich M.A. program in Creative Writing, and a selective Ph.D. program, our department can boast of extraordinary, prize-winning faculty, excellent students, and a diverse curriculum. Professor Larry Venuti, an internationally recognized expert in translation studies, recently received the highly prestigious Guggenheim award. Professor Suzanne Gauch received a Fulbright and is spending her year in Fez, Morroco conducting her research. And Professor Rachel Blau DuPlessis received a fellowship at the National Humanities Center for this year. Our creative writing faculty has also received numerous national awards, including Pew Fellowships in the Arts in both 2002 and 2006 for two of our poets, (Rachel DuPlessis) and (Jena Osman), while Professor Samuel Delany science fiction is nationally and internationally recognized. This year begins us two new faculty, and new faculty publications. This fall, Talissa Ford and Nichole Miller joined us from UC Berkeley and UC Irvine: our new colleagues are leading our students through Romantic literature (Ford) and Renaissance literature and Shakespeare (Miller). And a number of scholarly books appeared from Professors Eli Goldblatt, Peter Logan, and Shannon Miller. Their wide-ranging work—from Professor Logan’s work on Victorian literature and anthropology, Miller’s work on John Milton and 17th century women writers, and Goldblatt’s book on community literacy—has been nationally recognized, as with the Writing Program Administrators’ book award for Professor Goldblatt. Award-winning for scholarship, we are also a department that can boast of extraordinary teachers, who have received recognition from national societies, our own College, and the entire University community. Professor Steve Newman was recognized by the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies for his innovative course design as well as receiving a Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts. And Temple 's most coveted “Great Teaching Awards” have been presented to Eli Goldblatt, Joan Mellen and Phil Yanella .

We welcome undergraduate and graduate students to explore our offerings in British and American literature, international fiction and film, composition and rhetoric, theory, and creative writing. With 550 undergraduate majors and 120 graduate students, we host a lively and diverse curriculum, with faculty committed to American Studies and Women’s Studies.

Welcome to our web site and our department. Please browse our course offerings, our faculty profiles, and our departmental readings and lecture series. With a range of funding opportunities for graduate students in two distinct programs and an exciting and challenging undergraduate curriculum, we invite you to consider this as your intellectual home as you explore the enticing field of English Studies.

Sincerely,

Shannon Miller
Chair and Associate Professor
Department of English
Temple University