UB English Department
306 Clemens Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: 716-645-2575
FAX: 716-645-5980
The English Major
The English Major at the University at Buffalo offers students the opportunity to work in small classroom settings with nationally and internationally renowned faculty on the skills of reading closely, writing lucidly, and thinking analytically. It is the only nationally ranked English Department in the SUNY system, and currently ranks within the top 25% of all university English Departments in the nation. English is also one of UB’s most popular, useful, and comprehensive majors. The study of literature is the study of life in all its dimensions, and English Department professors teach their courses in that spirit: a study of literature enables fuller comprehension and enjoyment of language and life, across a spectrum of centuries, genres, and literary traditions.
For over half a century, the English Department at the University at Buffalo has been at the forefront of innovative writing and cultural criticism and it is internationally renowned as a place where the exploration of new ideas happens. Faculty have included poets and novelists who have helped shape contemporary writing—including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, and John Barth. The department’s scholarly faculty has been similarly ground-breaking in bringing new ideas to the field—asking what literature is, how it matters to our lives, how it intersects with multiple aspects of culture, and what makes the study of literature vital for local and global understanding. Students in the program work with faculty at all levels—from introductory classes to advanced seminars, independent studies, and honors theses. Current faculty and students continue the department’s tradition of being on the cutting edge of thinking about the study of literature and culture in all of their rich variety.
Want to find out more about the English Major? Go here: English Major
Department Officers
David Schmid
Department Chair
Office: 320 Clemens Hall
View the full list of department officers.
This Week's Events and Recent News
Please click here to read the English Department's Fall 2009 Newsletter.
Jorge Guitart
Poetics Plus
February 10 @ 6 PM
Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall
Lisa Robertson
Poetics Plus
Lecture: “Disquiet”
February 12 @ 3:30 PM
Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall
Poetry Reading
February 12 @ 8 PM
Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street
Alison Des Forges Memorial Celebration
Film: “Hotel Rwanda”
Hosted by Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian
February 12 @ 4 PM
Student Union Theater, 215 Student Union
Film: “Sometimes in April”
Hosted by Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian
February 13 @ 5 PM
Student Union Theater, 215 Student Union
UB English Department faculty members are active in the profession as both researchers and lecturers. Here is a selection of their recent accomplishments.
In the summer of 2008, Rachel Ablow co-taught a graduate seminar at the 'Dickens Universe' gathering at UC Santa Cruz. In addition, Professor Ablow has recently delivered papers at several conferences. In November 2008, she spoke on "Feeling's Failure in Villette" at the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference in New Haven, CT. In the same month, she chaired a panel entitled "The Presence of Pain: Language, Bodies and Interiors" at the Group for the Study of Early Modern Cultural Studies in Philadelphia, PA and also gave a paper, "The Victorian Truth of Torture," at the same conference. Finally, at the annual Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco in December 2008, Rachel gave two papers: "Embodying Consciousness" and "Imagining Torture."
Carrie Tirado Bramen delivered a lecture entitled “The Banality of Niceness: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Jesus Novel and Sacred Trivialities,” as part of a symposium on “Cultures of American Religious Liberalism” at Yale in September. http://www.yale.edu/ism/events/religious_liberalism.html
A longer version of the talk will appear in a forthcoming volume entitled Beyond Protestant Modernism: American Religious Liberalism Revisited, ed. Leigh Schmidt and Sally Promey (Indiana UP). Carrie Bramen’s essay on Leslie Fiedler appears in A New Literary History of America, ed Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus, which was just published by Harvard UP. This summer, she was a NEMLA Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. She will present “On Neighborliness” at the American Studies Association conference in Washington DC in early November.
Joan Copjec has been named the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago for 2009-2010.
Congratulations to Professor Robert Daly, who has won the 2009 Geoffrey Marshall Mentoring Award from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. As the award announcement states, "This award is given in recognition of [his] most outstanding support and mentoring of graduate students in the English department at SUNY Buffalo. [His] nomination materials greatly impressed all the members of the committee reviewing the nominations for the award."
Tim Dean published "A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy" (Fordham University Press, 2008).
Graham Hammill's essay, "Time For Marlowe," recently appeared in ELH 75 (Summer 2008): 291-314.
Jim Holstun’s essay, “Utopia Pre-Empted: Kett’s Rebellion, Commoning, and the Hysterical Sublime,” recently appeared in the journal Historical Materialism (16.3, 2008: 3-53).
In June 2008, Stacy Hubbard delivered a paper entitled "Homesteading on the Urban Frontier: Immigration and Housing Reform in American Cities, 1890-1924," at the "Migration Matters" conference in Leiden, the Netherlands.
Philosophy and Rhetoric recently published Arabella Lyon's essay "Rhetorical Authority in Athenian Democracy and the Chinese Legalism of Han Fei.” Her book review of Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education by Bill Marsh appeared in Composition Studies. In 2008 she has presented the following talks “Procedural Democracy and Deliberative Rhetoric: Revising Habermas” at Rhetoric Society of America, “Narratives, Private and Public: Hannah Arendt’s Storytelling” at SUNY Conference on Writing, “First Amendment Contradictions and Paradoxes" at Northeast Modern Language Association, and “Four Ways of Looking at Comparative Rhetoric” at Conference on College Composition and Communication. She was the invited respondent to Jiyuan Yu's Humanities Institute talk, “Metaphysics of the Soul and the Development of Chinese and Greek Ethics.”
Ruth Mack’s essay, “Horace Walpole and the Objects of Literary History,” appeared recently in English Literary History 75 (2008): 367-87.
Emeritus faculty member Irving Massey recently gave a seminar at Cambridge University in England, lectured at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and chaired a session at an international conference in Italy devoted to work of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Carla Mazzio recently published The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14527.html, and edited Shakespeare & Science, a Special Double Issue of Johns Hopkins’ South Central Review (Winter & Spring 2009) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_central_review/summary/v026/26.1-2.mazzio01.html
Steve McCaffery's recent publications include an essay entitled "Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap," which appears in the collection "A Time for the Humanities' (Fordham UP, 2009), whose editors include Steve's UB English Department colleague, Tim Dean. Steve has also published two collections of poetry, "Slightly Left of Thinking" (Chax Press), and "Every Way Oakly: Homolinguistic translations of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons" (Book Thug). Finally, Steve has edited and written an introduction for the first Canadian edition of Stein's "Tender Buttons.
Randy P. Schiff’s essay, “The Loneness of the Stalker: Poaching and Subjectivity in The Parlement of the Thre Ages,” recently appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51 (2009): 263-93; and his essay, “Borderland Subversions: Anti-Imperialist Energies in The Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and Gawane” recently appeared in Speculum 84 (2009): 613-32.”
David Schmid's "Letter to Obama" appears in the January 2009 issue of "Politics and Culture" http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=708
Andrew Stott’s 2005 book, "Comedy" (Routledge), has just been translated into Persian and published by Nashr-e-Cheshmeh of Iran.
Dennis Tedlock recently published an article entitled "Transcription between Languages" in Interval(le)s 3:871-896 (2009). The article, including a link to an audio file, can be found at the following address: http://www.cipa.ulg.ac.be/intervalles4/contentsinter4.php.
Oxford University Press will publish Max Wickert’s translation of Torquato Tasso’s The Liberation of Jerusalem in March 2009. In the same month, Professor Wickert will give an invited lecture on Tasso at the University of Exeter, England.
Howard Wolf presented a paper at the Tenth International Conference of the F. ScottFitzgerald Society in Baltimore (Sept. 30-Oct. 3): "Challenges to the Self in the 20th Century: Keats, Fitzgerald, and E.T. (Extreme Theory)." "Fitzgerald's Palpable Dream: 'The City
seen for the first time,'" will be published in the winter issue of DIALOG (Panjab University, Chandigarh, India).
