Department of English
Kimpel Hall 333,
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
P 479-575-4301
F 479-575-5919
E-mail: engl@uark.edu
English Department Statement in Solidarity with Protests
Dear Members and Friends of the English Department,
We are reaching out to you in pain and solidarity in these days of uprising against our nation’s fundamental structural injustices, longstanding and deep-rooted injustices most recently exposed by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and others. Our university, like so many, has long participated in maintaining those structures, as our administrators have acknowledged. We must all work together, and stand up for one another, if we are to help bring change.
Read the rest of the department's statement by clicking here.
Click here for a list of links to other statements and organizations in support of Black Lives Matter.
Click here for the department's response to #BlackatUark.
Department of English
Watch the University's Indigenous Roots and Futures Virtual Panel Discussion (11/19/20)!
Department of English
Bestselling Author and Guest Speaker Daniel Mallory Ortberg with Department Faculty
Department of English
Lora Walsh Teaching English Literature from the Beginning through the 17th Century
CORONAVIRUS / COVID-19 UPDATES
For everyone’s safety, many faculty and staff members are continuing to work remotely. We are still available to assist you during our normal office hours, and recommend reaching out via email to get in touch.
Looking for the latest campus updates on Coronavirus/COVID-19? The #UARK website has the most up-to-date information at https://health.uark.edu/coronavirus/.
Please note: Guidance from the CDC, Arkansas Department of Health and university may change rapidly given the fluidity of the situation.
Find Current and Past Course Descriptions
News
Seven Faculty Members Honored With Outstanding Distinctions in 2020 (Jan. 20, 2021)
English Graduate Student Publishes Horror Novel (Dec. 22, 2020)
Seven Students Named Winners in Undergraduate Research Poster Competition (Dec. 14, 2020)
Department of English Mourns Passing of Professor Emerita Suzanne MacRae (Dec. 8, 2020)
Interdisciplinary Collaboration Results in Illustrated Literary Magazine (Nov. 24, 2020)
Author Spotlight
Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (June 2020)
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Lissette Lopez Szwydky-Davis
Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers (April 2020)
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](/departments/english/_resources/author-spotlight/understanding.jpg)
Casey Kayser (co-editor)
Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans (August 2019)
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/downtown-mardi-gras.jpg)
Robin Roberts (co-author)
Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America's Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm (February 2019)
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Kay Yandell
Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster's Eternal Lives in Popular Culture (October 2018)
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/adapting-frankenstein.jpg)
Lissette Szwydky-Davis (contributor)
Star Trek: A Cultural History (The Cultural History of Television) (September 2018)
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/star-trek.jpg)
M. Keith Booker
Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture (January 2018)
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/subversive-spirits.jpg)
Robin Roberts
Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (November 2017)
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/small-screen.png)
Lisa Hinrichsen (co-editor)
An Arkansas Florilegium: The Atlas of Botanist Edwin Smith Illustrated by Naturalist Kent Bonar (October 2017)
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/arkansas-florilegium.jpg)
Robert Cochran (editor)
Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom (May 2017)
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/deep-reading-cover.jpg)
David Jolliffe and Sam Morris (contributors)
The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society (January 2017)
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/the-ozarks.jpg)
Robert Cochran (editor)
The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: Culture, Place, & Authenticity
David Jolliffe (co-author)
The Essex and the Whale: Melville's Leviathan Library and the Birth of Moby Dick
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/the-essex-and-the-whale.jpg)
Robert Madison (editor)
Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/mahany-post-exoticism.jpg)
J.T. Mahany (translator)
MFA Translation Student
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
![td[@class='image']/img/@alt](_resources/author-spotlight/eng-book-1.jpg)
Padma Viswanathan
Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards.
Olde Clerkis Speche: Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and the Implications of Authorial Recital
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William Quinn
Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton
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Robert Cochran and Suzanne McCray
Graduate Programs

M.A./Ph.D. in English
While rigorous in terms of the level of research and scholarship they require, the M.A. and Ph.D. Programs in English also emphasize professionalization to prepare students for employment inside or outside of academia.

Creative Writing & Translation
One of the nation’s oldest MFA Programs, and one of the “Top Five Most Innovative” (The Atlantic Monthly), we offer degree tracks in Fiction, Poetry and Literary Translation.

Graduate Certificate in Technical Writing & Public Rhetorics
A fully online 12 credit hour graduate program developed to meet the needs of working professionals and graduate students in Northwest Arkansas and beyond.
DEPARTMENT STATEMENT ON
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one’s self from the tyranny of any of them.
--José Martí
We in the English Department of the University of Arkansas believe a respect for policies and practices that foster diverse voices and viewpoints, that protect all members of our community against discrimination, and that maintain appropriate professional boundaries is integral to the success of our students and our program.
We acknowledge that structures of historical oppression are still operational today, sometimes more visibly and sometimes less, and that efforts toward diversity and inclusion must permeate all levels of practice, from curriculum to teaching, from admissions to hiring, taking into account race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, religion, neurodiversity, country of origin, citizenship status, socio-economic status, physical and mental health, and other factors that can divide and disadvantage.
Our department consists of three broad areas—literature, creative writing, and rhetoric and composition—within which our community of scholars fosters intellectual and aesthetic diversity. We try to continually reconsider what constitutes the center and the canon of our disciplines, and to renovate our departmental culture and teaching practices in response to evolving student, state, and national populations. With these conversations, we hope to provoke mutual reflection on how to respect one another's differences and build from the diversity of our communities.
We hope, above all, that if you come to us as a student, we can teach you to question, in large part by modeling our own engagement with the questions that drive us.
Reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside… and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.
--Audre Lorde