DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Meet our 2021 Honors Students and Annual Writing Competition Winners!

We’re thrilled to announce the outcomes of the 2020-2021 English Department Annual Writing Competition, as well as the students who received departmental Honors and the winners of the Best Thesis Award and Best Seniors/ Juniors.  Please join us in celebrating our students’ work and sending them congratulations.

We encourage you to visit the Honors and Prize Winners' website to learn about our Honors students' projects and see excerpts from prize winners' works.

Ivy Wilson and Laura Brueck (Department of Asian Languages and Cultures) have received a large grant from the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs to support a two-year initiative on “Race, Caste, and Colorism,” which will look comparatively at India, the Caribbean, and the US and engage faculty from several units. This grant continues Ivy’s long-term work catalyzing new research collaborations across units in ethnic studies and the humanities, a role that also defines his current work as Director of the Black Arts Consortium. 

Evan Mwangi has been named the new Melville J. Herskovits Professor of African Studies. This chair recognizes Evan’s international reputation as one of the leading scholars of Anglophone African literature. Details on his investiture will be released at a later date, when we can gather in person to honor his accomplishments.  

Natasha Trethewey was announced as one of the winners of The Cleveland Foundation’s  86^th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for her book, Memorial Drive.  The awards recognize books that have made important contributions to the understanding of racism and human diversity.  Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf established the book awards in 1935, in honor of her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family’s passion for social justice.