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
Cristanne Miller
Department Chair
Office: 320 Clemens Hall
View the full list of department officers.
This Week's Events and Recent News
English Department Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony
May 10th 2-4 PM
Student Union Theatre
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 will be a NEMLA Fellow this summer at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA. Her essay on Leslie Fiedler will appear in A New Literary History of America, edited by Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus (Harvard UP, September 2009)
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.
Randy Schiff’s essay, “The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in 'The Siege of Jerusalem,” was recently published in Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008). In July 2008, he delivered a paper entitled, “Masks of Old Age: The Pardoner, Morgan le Fay, and Sublime Decrepitude,” at the International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, held at Swansea University in Wales.
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's article, "After the 1960's: Close Reading and the Limits of Postmodernism," will be published in a forthcoming issue of
"Cithara: Essays on the Judaeo-Christian Tradition." He also recently presented a paper on this subject at a Special Session of NYCEA (New York College English Association), at St. Bonaventure University in October 2008. Finally, Howard has been invited to lecture under the auspices of the US Embassy/Berlin in Berlin, Potsdam, and Bonn in May, 2009 on American literature, culture, and education with an emphasis on urban experience.
