Department of English

Writers and musicians from Marianne Moore to Patti Smith are the subject of Longenbach’s new book The Lyric Now.

An adjunct instructor in the University of Rochester’s English department, Melissa Balmain is the Humor Writer of the Month this December.

English professor Bette London introduces students to Nobel-winning authors and the controversies surrounding the prize.

Students and faculty members adapt to new—and safety-conscious—ways of interacting as teachers, scholars, and researchers.

Rochester professor Gregory Heyworth and his Lazarus Project colleagues have created a 3-D model of one of the treasures of the New York Public Library, the Hunt-Lenox Globe, one of the first globes to show the New World — and to warn "Here be dragons."

This tiny book was acquired by the Smithsonian in 1925. It’s made up of 147 folios of parchment, or treated animal hide, stitched together. The “over text”—the visible text—is of an Armenian prayer book, suspected to date from the 15th century. But there is also an “under text”—a work that was erased to recycle the parchment for the over text. The Smithsonian has turned to University of Rochester professor Gregory Heyworth and his Lazarus Project to help solve the mystery of what that long-ago effaced text might be.

The University of Rochester will recognize the outstanding contributions of distinguished alumni, educators, and scientists by bestowing the Eastman Medal, Hutchison Medal, and awards for scholarship and teaching.

Speakers of a language rely on its words to carry out even the most mundane acts of communication. But the same words are poets’ medium of creation. In his newest book, How Poems Get Made, James Longenbach asks how poets turn bare utterance into art.

The picture of the Middle Ages as "awful, smelly, stinky, [and] dangerous" is not accurate, says medievalist and University of Pennsylvania professor David Wallace, this year’s Ferrari Humanities Symposia visiting scholar.

Kaija Straumanis ’12 (MA) has received the Lillian Fairchild Award—which recognizes artists for their commitment to the Rochester community—for her work bringing world literature to new audiences.