Department of English

Welcome Back, Everyone We got off to a busy start last week, launching more than a hundred and fifteen classes with enrollments in excess of 2500 students (I hesitate to add that we also went through something like thirty thousand sheets of paper, despite an initiative to “go paperless” for the distribution of syllabi this […]

Greetings, everyone! The office has been bustling with energy all morning as we return from the longer-than-usual break and embark upon another semester of teaching. Ellen, Celeste, and I wish you well as the fun gets underway. I plan to resume the weekly bulletins next week (please send items for possible inclusion along by noon […]

End of Semester Celebration on Thursday Please plan on joining us for an end-of-semester party this Thursday, December 14, starting at 1pm in the Wicks Room. As in the past, the celebration will be a pot luck affair, so consider bringing something sweet, savory, seasonable, surprising. Everyone is welcome, including friends, family, and well-behaved pets. CLAS Student Emergency […]

First-Year Writing Program Earns National Certificate of Excellence We’re pleased to announce that the University of Maine’s College Composition program has won a 2017-2018 CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence. The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Our program is one of […]

Welcome to the twelfth installment of the English Department’s weekly bulletin. As we return from a welcome break we look ahead to two more weeks of instruction and then finals week. Please let us know how we can help as you head into the home stretch of the fall semester! Celebrating the Poetry of John […]

Celebrating the Poetry of John Ashbery on November 30 When John Ashbery died at the age of ninety on September 3, just as the fall semester was getting underway here in Orono, we immediately began planning a celebration of this major poet’s long life and prolific body of work. On Thursday, November 30, that celebration will commence with a presentation […]

Tony Brinkley Translations of Baudelaire Professor of English and Senior Faculty Advisor to the Franco-American Center Tony Brinkley has published translations of three poems from Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal in the fall issue of the journal Metamorphoses (25.1). The three poems Baudelaire dedicated to Victor Hugo— “The Swan,” “The Seven Old Men,” and “The Little Old Women”—appear in Brinkley’s translation […]

Weathering the Windstorm The fierce winds of a week ago delivered many of us into a bewildering Halloween week without power. Resourceful English majors reported reading by candlelight, flashlight, and headlamp. One, who found herself plunged into “seventy acres of darkness and silence,” took the occasion to rediscover reading for pleasure, adding “I forgot how […]

Advising for Winter Session and Spring 2018 Semester Graduate students and seniors who have earned 84 credits or more will be able to enroll for the spring 2018 semester beginning this week. Enrollment for the winter term opens at the same time. Faculty advisors will want to acquaint themselves with the course description pamphlet prepared by Ellen […]

Meet Maine Top Scholar and English Major Nicole Whitman An inaugural cohort of twenty “Top Scholars” matriculated at UMaine this fall. Students chosen for this honor receive a Maine Matters scholarship that covers full tuition and fees and is renewable for four years. Top Scholars also receive an unrestricted stipend of $500 to work with their faculty […]