2025-04-21
- Mary Rose Cottingham, a senior instructor in English, has earned a Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. According to the Office of the Provost, which sponsors the awards, Cottingham was nominated because she has been transforming the lives of undergraduates at Illinois for over 20 years. She establishes a connection with each student by responding thoughtfully to their...
2025-04-16 - Corey Van Landingham, professor of English in the Creative Writing Program, has been awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. Van Landingham is one of two U of I fellowship recipients, along with history professor Kristin Hoganson.The two are among 198 individuals working across 53 disciplines chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from nearly...
2025-03-26 - Two graduate students and one professor in the Department of English have been awarded Humanities Research Institute fellowships. The three were among fourteen selected for this year’s fellowship under the theme of “Story and Place.” Amy Hassinger, professor of English in the Creative Writing Program, has been selected as a faculty fellow for her project, “DIMMENING, a linked collection of...
2025-03-25 - Janice Harrington, professor of English in the Creative Writing Program, has been inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame, a partnership between the Alabama Writers’ Forum and the Alabama Center for the Book at the University of Alabama, celebrates writers from the state who have earned national and international recognition for their...
2025-03-20 - Waïl S. Hassan, professor and head of the Department of Comparative & World Literature and professor of English, has been elected second vice president of the Modern Language...
2025-03-19 - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign English professor Janice Harrington examines the natural world, the histories of Black residents in the Midwest and how people create a sense of place for themselves in her most recent book of poetry, “Yard Show...
2025-03-17 - An LAS alumna has published her first novel that explores the idea of being able to literally shape your ideal partner from scratch. Maggie Su (BA, ’13, creative writing/English) is the assistant director for the University Writing Center at the University of Notre Dame. Her book was recently released in January after seven years of brainstorming, writing, and revising as her dissertation for...
2025-02-25 - The literature of extreme poverty during the Great Depression offered an aesthetic that matched the hopelessness and isolation of the unemployed and those living on the street. Robert Dale Parker, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-...
2025-02-11 - John Milas’ journey as a writer has been far from typical, but those unique experiences helped shape his gripping gothic horror novel about a mysterious abandoned building in Afghanistan and the soldiers who would never be the same after entering it. A Champaign-Urbana native, Milas (BA, ’16, creative writing) attended Parkland College for one year before enlisting in the Marines. He served from...
2025-02-10 - The English major is dead. Or at least that seems an increasingly common perception since the advent of artificial intelligence and the release of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT. Much of this pessimism could be attributed to the sensationalism surrounding AI. Some AI advocates exalt it as a revolutionary force that is already helping us overcome our most challenging problems. Some skeptics denounce...
2025-02-07 - The College of LAS has selected 16 professors, graduate students, lecturers, and advisors as the recipients of the 2025 teaching and advising rewards. "We are honored and fortunate to have so many amazing teachers and advisors in the College of LAS,” said Venetria K. Patton, the Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. “From long-time professors and advisors to...
2025-02-05 - A new novel by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign English professor David Wright Faladé tells the story of three people in a love triangle in post-World War II Paris. The characters in “The New Internationals” — a young French woman who...
2025-02-04 - It was a love of reading that led Jean Sklansky (BA, ’72, teaching of English) to English. For Steve Kaplan (BS, ’72, business), it was his interest in Jean. The two students from Chicago, who met at a mixer between the men’s and women’s residence halls the first Sunday of new student orientation, would go on to date for all four years at Illinois. Despite being in a different college, Steve...
2024-12-23 - Creative writing professor Janice Harrington’s poetry collection, Yard Show, has earned a spot on the National Book Critics Circle’s 2024 NBCC Awards longlist for poetry. The poetry collection fuses Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world to investigate how Black Americans have shaped a sense of...
2024-12-17 - The Modern Language Association (MLA) has named English professor Jamie L. Jones’ book Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling to its shortlist for outstanding books. Her book, published by the University of North Carolina Press, was one of five titles chosen by the MLA. The book examines the...