Terry Oggel

Welcome to our website. Read about our faculty and our programs, and also about the enhancements we are continuing to make

• to the structure and curriculum of the general education program,
  
  
• to the special features of the major that are attracting both in-state and out-of-state students,
  
  
• and to the components that aid recruitment and selectivity in the MA, MFA and PhD in Media, Art, and Text programs.

Leading off are advances we're making to our MFA and PhD programs.  This fall we are instituting a Distinguished Writers Series in our MFA program. Claudia Emerson is the first writer in this annual series, which will bring an acclaimed writer to campus to conduct master classes with advanced MFA students.  Ms. Emerson, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 2006, will meet with advanced poetry graduate students over five weeks, conducting workshops and meeting individually with each student. In January, the MFA program will hold a special event at the annual conference of the Association of Writing Programs in New York as a way of celebrating its 25th year.

Also this year we welcome the PhD program's second class of students, eleven people coming from across the country and around the world who bring with them backgrounds in new media, art, and mass communications, among many diverse areas of academic and personal expertise. The program is being administered in the English department, though in concept and in practice it is undertaken with the tripartite collaboration of the English department, the School of the Arts, and the School of Mass Communications.  As it grows and develops, it is truly living up to its design as an interdisciplinary program in media, art, and text.

During the academic year just concluded, we taught nearly 13,500 students in 459 classes. This included 1) writing courses and general education literature courses for students throughout the university; 2) upper-level courses for our majors; 3) courses offered in support of a number of interdisciplinary programs (American Studies, African American Studies, Honors, Women's Studies, Linguistics, Environmental Studies, and others); and 4) graduate courses for the MA in English, the MFA in Creative Writing, and the PhD in MATX programs. Last year, 600 undergraduates majored in English. These, combined with 74 MA students (in two tracks—Literature, and Writing and Rhetoric), 34 MFA students in Creative Writing (primary tracks in poetry and fiction), and 27 students in the PhD program bring the total to 735 VCU students who declare the English department to be their academic home.

The 2006/2007 academic year was a redefining year in our department’s history.  This year marked the final year of English 101 and our preparation for the transfer of first-year writing instruction to the new University College in the fall of 2007.  During the year, we launched a two-year review of the MA program to enhance it in light of new interdisciplinary approaches and pedagogies.  We welcomed 12 students as the first class in our new PhD program.  Our faculty mounted several new courses including “Dollars Damn Me:  Earlier American Literature and the Emergence of Mass Culture in the United States”; “Women’s Autobiography”; “The Arts in Contemporary Britain”; “Scottish Literature”; “American Crime”; “Literature in Society:  Early Modern Poetry Anthology”; “Literary Editing and Publishing”; “Text and Textuality”; and “History of Media, Art, and Text.”

The department developed a new minor in creative writing, while at the same time streamlining the undergraduate curriculum to make the major more coherent and attractive to incoming students who are considering English as a major.  As part of the changes to the undergraduate curriculum, the department instituted a new advising structure for the major that features a full-time advisor.  This permits the Director of Undergraduate Studies and our faculty to devote their time to initiating such projects as outreach efforts in high schools, job fairs to benefit our majors, and recruiting programs for more minority English majors. 

We continue our successful association with the School of the Arts, teaching English composition and general education literature courses in the Shaqab College of Design Arts in Doha, Qatar and, in the summer of 2007, offering a program of study in Peru that took writers and visual artists to Lima, Cuzco and Machu Picchu. 

Our faculty continue to accrue honors and acclaim.  MFA Program Director David Wojahn was named one of three finalists in the 2007 Pulitzer Prize competition, and David won the prestigious Hardison Award given annually to a United States poet whose art and teaching demonstrate the spirit of inquiry, imagination, daring, and scholarship.  During the year, English faculty published ten books, 34 refereed articles and chapters, 3 essays and interviews, 4 non-peer reviewed articles, and 8 reviews.  Tom De Haven and Susann Cokal each saw novels translated into foreign languages and brought out in paperback. 

Appearing during the year were Laura Browder’s Her Best Shot:  Women and Guns in America; Winnie Chan’s The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s; Susann Cokal’s Breath and Bones; Marcel Cornis-Pope’s co-edited History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe:  Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries; Elisabeth Kuhn’s Average C-Cup:  Poems; and Sachi Shimomura’s Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature.  David Latané, general editor of Victorians Institute Journal, brought out volume 34 of the VIJ. David is also United States editor for the British literary quarterly Stand Magazine. Laura Browder was named the College’s Elske v.p. Smith Distinguished Lecturer for 2007.

During the year, the department was actively engaged in service to the profession, to the community, and to the university.  Nicholas Frankel currently serves on the Executive Committee for the Society for Textual Scholarship and co-chaired the organization’s 14th Biennial International Conference at New York University.  Marcel Cornis-Pope is a member of the Coordinating Publication Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association and on the Executive Committee of the Division on Comparative Literary Studies in 20th Century Literature, MLA.  Charlotte Morse is on the editorial boards of The Chaucer Review and the Journal of the Early Book Society.  Richard Fine is a member of the editorial board for Book History, an annual publication of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.  Susann Cokal served as judge for the PEN-America Translation Award and the Virginia Commission for the Arts Grants.  She also writes book reviews for the New York Times Review of Books. 

David Wojahn is a contributing editor of the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.  He is also an Advisory Board Member of the literary quarterly, Hunger Mountain; a member of the Advisory Committee of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College; and he served as judge for Virginia entries to the “Poetry Out Loud” competition for the National Endowment for the Arts.  Laura Browder is a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for documentaries dealing with American subjects.  Clint McCown serves as a contributing editor for Colorado Review and was instrumental in bringing writers to campus for readings in the Visiting Writers series.  In the Richmond community and beyond, Tom De Haven conducted workshops and readings for various groups and organizations across the country.  Regarding his novel It's Superman, he was also interviewed on WCVE (Richmond) and WFLO (Farmville) radio stations, and he made presentations at the Great Lakes Booksellers Association (Dearborn, MI) and the Wisconsin Book Fair (Madison). 

David Coogan continues to teach writing workshops with inmates at the Richmond City Jail.  Through his work, he was invited to join the Community Engagement Committee, a college-wide committee charged with gathering information on community work and gaining resources to advance it.  Richard Fine is a member of the Board of Directors of Orchard House School and is co-chair of the Conference Planning Committee to celebrate Sabot School’s 35th anniversary.  Bryant Mangum remains an active member of the Board of Directors of the Morattico Waterfront Museum in Morattico, Virginia, and serves as that entity’s Museum Historian.  Within the university, English faculty worked on the committee to devise and implement University College’s Focused Inquiry program.  English faculty also served on the University Equity and Diversity Committee, Mediterranean Studies Committee, Planning Committee for the university-wide Core Curriculum, University Honors College Council, Faculty Senate, Campus Safety Committee, and Libraries Committee, among many others.

Our award-winning online journal of literature and the arts, Blackbird, published in partnership with the New Virginia Review, Inc. marked a high point in its history in the fall issue when it brought out a previously unpublished poem by Sylvia Plath that received worldwide attention.  Claudia Emerson, 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, highlighted the list of distinguished writers in our Visiting Writers series.  The Ninth Levis Reading Prize, awarded for the best first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year, went to Ron Slate, for his collection The Incentive of the Maggot.  The First Novelist Award, now in its fifth year, went to Karen Fisher, for A Sudden Country. 

Richard Fine led the department's work in presenting an NEH-sponsored year-long series of events, Humanities for the Twenty-First Century:  Creating and Consuming Culture in the Digital Age, focusing on the impact of digital technologies on contemporary culture generally and the humanities and arts specifically.  The series culminated in a presentation by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

Graduate student Courtney Fenner and English major Nevless Liner were recipients of the Black History in the Making award for outstanding work as students and university citizens.  Our graduate students received accolades: Ben Dombroski and Catherine MacDonald received the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize; Catherine was also awarded an Academy of American Poets prize and received a scholarship from Ropewalk Writers Retreat.  Tarfia Faizullah’s “Ramadan Aubade” was selected as one of the winners of the 2007 Intro Journals Project and will be published in the Mid-American Review.  Nick Reading was a finalist for the Best of the Net Anthology; Anna Journey won the 2007 Diner poetry contest and was awarded a residency at Yaddo.  Brian Castleberry won the department's Writing Award for graduate fiction, and he and Michele Poulos shared the department nomination for possible inclusion in the Best New Voices anthology.

The VCU Department of English is dynamic and multifaceted.  It will continue to take the lead in intellectual and artistic advances while it responds to developments in pedagogy and technology, and to shifts in student interest.  Check out other parts of our website frequently, for news of course adoptions, graduate and undergraduate program redesign, faculty and student accomplishments, and evidence of our dedication to our profession, community, and university.   

Terry Oggel, Chair
August 14, 2007