Prof. Dixa Ramírez-D'Oleo's new book, This Will Not Be Generative, published by Cambridge University Press, "attends to the semiotics of ecological writings via Caribbean literary studies and black critical theory. Closely reading texts by Donna Haraway, Monique Allewaert, and Lisa Wells, and exposes how the language of tentacles and tendrils, an assumptive 'we,' and redemptive sympathy or 'care' disguises extraction from black people and blackness. This often speculative rhetoric, abetted by fantasies of white communion with indigenous groups, contrasts with the horror semiotics of the films Get Out (2017) and Midsommar (2019), which unmask the antagonistic relationship between white survival 'at the end of the world' and blackness as compost."

The best piece of advice I can think of is to be flexible and adaptable to the changing realities of the field/job market/this crazy and precarious world, and be creative and expansive in your conception of what a PhD in English can contribute (a lot!)

Remember that your own happiness is more important than proving to yourself or others that you can succeed in a job market that is fundamentally broken.

By dumb luck I got at tenure-track job my first year on the market. You must keep that in mind: Brown will get you in the mix, but from there it is 75% luck.

As writers, teachers, editors, and researchers, our skills are broadly applicable. It might feel difficult to communicate that to potential employers without a full-time job on your resume, but a little experience here and there during graduate school can help get your foot in the door.

Professor Timothy Bewes wins the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book Free Indirect: The Novel In A Postfictional Age!

Timothy Bewes's recent book, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, was named a 2022 National Book Critics Award finalist in Criticism.

Grace Talusan, Lecturer in the Nonfiction Writing Program, has been awarded The Massachusetts Fellowship, a fully funded, 4-week residency focused on building a close-knit cohort of Massachusetts artists of all disciplines from across the Commonwealth.

Grace Talusan, Lecturer in the Nonfiction Writing Program, interviews Monica Macansantos about her latest collection of stories, Love and Other Rituals (University of Melbourne’s Grattan Street Press, 2022).

Professor Ada Smailbegović received honorable mention in the Matei Calinescu Prize, awarded for "a distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth- or twenty-first-century literature and thought in any geographical context," for her book Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds (Columbia University Press, 2021). Twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, Smailbegović argues, have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation.

Professor Kevin Quashie has won the James Russell Lowell Prize, awarded to "an outstanding literary or linguistic study or a critical biography," for his 2021 book Black Aliveness; or, a Poetics of Being (Duke University Press). In Black Aliveness, Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is, rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study.

As part of the annual Nonfiction@Brown lecture series, Maggie Nelson — New York Times bestselling author of 10 books of poetry and prose — read from her latest book, “On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint.” She discussed how we “think, experience and talk about freedom” for an audience at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts

Each day I discover something new, and I have the intellectual agency to pursue new ideas.

The Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism annually honors one book-length work of criticism published in the prior calendar year, and includes a prize of $7,500. Kevin Quashie is the 2022 recipient for his book Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, which draws on Black feminist literary texts, including work by poets Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan.

A short piece by Stuart Burrows on the novel “The Investigations” by Juan José Saer.

Elizabeth Rush reflects on her recent journey to Antarctica onboard a research icebreaker in this week's Sunday New York Times.

On the day of the attack on Salman Rushdie in Chautauqua, Timothy Bewes spoke to the BBC on the literary significance of Rushdie's work.

Elizabeth Rush spoke with students at Bryn Mawr College about resisting extraction in nonfiction storytelling for Terrain Magazine.

What is the purpose of a novel? How satisfactory are the meanings that literary critics assign to novels? How has the novel changed? What does the novel share with cinema, and what does that mean for thought and literary criticism in the contemporary period? Iqra S. Cheema talks with Timothy Bewes about these and other questions as addressed in his book Free Indirect.

In this essay featured in Orion Magazine, Elizabeth Rush travels to Antarctica as she considers motherhood in an age of glacial loss.

Interview with Paul Armstrong in June 2022 about his work on literature and neuroscience in Seisma, a London-based magazine that focuses on the relations between art and science. The discussion focuses on Paul's books How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (2013) and Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative (2020), and examines the differences between taxonomic and phenomenological literary theories as well as types of cognition such as perception and selfhood as they relate to reading and literature. How might a neuro-phenomenological approach to literary studies facilitate our understanding of the interrelation between humans and literature?

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke with Derek Shearer about current political issues, his own personal interests and gave career advice to future generations.

Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore, wrote a guest essay for the New York Times in April 2022 about people living in frontline flood communities, who may know something the rest of us do not about the looming threat of climate change.

Rhode Island State Arts Council awards Fellowships in Fiction and Poetry to Senior Lecturer Michael Stewart.