News and Events
News
Read stories and articles for and about current and prospective students and faculty in the English program.
Events
The English program hosts numerous events for its students and faculty.
View all upcoming English events
Friday Forums
To foster communal intellectual vitality and conviviality, the English Program sponsors Friday Forums weekly. Friday Forums bring to the GC internationally recognized scholars, writers, and publishers to discuss a wide variety of literary and cultural topics. This series of lectures and readings is followed by a reception with food and wine. Forums generally take place at 4 p.m. on Fridays, but many occur in conjunction with all-day conferences and interdisciplinary events. Some Forums are devoted to special issues of student/faculty concern, such as financial aid, adjunct teaching, curricular changes, and the education job market. The first Forum of the Fall Semester is generally an orientation session for new students in the Program, and the last one in each semester, the Winter/Spring Revels, is a party not to be missed.
Recent News
Sep 18, 2023
ChatGPT Tips for the CUNY Classroom, Version 2.0
Graduate Center scholars share their latest insights on teaching in an AI-infused world.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
- Student News
- Alumni News
Sep 15, 2023
Recognizing Leaders of Hispanic Scholarship
In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, we recognize our scholars who are leaders and pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
- GC Stories
- Student News
- Alumni News
- Faculty News
Aug 21, 2023
Eight Graduate Center Faculty Are Named CUNY Distinguished Professors
The rank is the highest at CUNY, bestowed on faculty who are leaders in their fields.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
Aug 18, 2023
How to Succeed in Grad School – From People Who Have Been Here
Our alumni and faculty share their best advice for success in graduate school.
- GC Stories
- Student News
- Alumni News
- Faculty News
Upcoming Events
Recent Faculty Publications
View all English Books
Scholars in COVID Times
Edited by Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo.
Scholars in COVID Times documents the new and innovative forms of scholarship, community collaboration, and teaching brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this volume, Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo bring together a diverse range of texts, from research-based studies to self-reflective essays, to reexamine what it means to be a publicly engaged scholar in the era of COVID.
Between social distancing, masking, and remote teaching—along with the devastating physical and emotional tolls on individuals and families—the disruption of COVID-19 in academia has given motivated scholars an opportunity (or necessitated them) to reconsider how they interact with and inspire students, conduct research, and continue collaborative projects. Addressing a broad range of factors, from anti-Asian racism to pedagogies of resilience and escapism, digital pen pals to international performance, the essays are connected by a flexible, creative approach to community engagement as a core aspect of research and teaching. Timely and urgent, but with long-term implications and applications, Scholars in COVID Times offers a heterogeneous vision of scholarly and pedagogical innovation in an era of contestation and crisis.
Published September 2023
Cornell University Press

"K for the Way"
DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies
“K for the Way” explores writing, rhetoric, and literacy from the perspective of the Hip Hop DJ. Todd Craig, a DJ himself, establishes and investigates the function of DJ rhetoric and literacy, illuminating the DJ as a fruitful example for (re)envisioning approaches to writing, research, and analysis in contemporary educational settings. Because it is widely recognized that the DJ was the catalyst for the creation of Hip Hop culture, this book begins a new conversation in which Hip Hop DJs introduce ideas about poetics and language formation through the modes, practices, and techniques they engage in on a daily basis.
Using material from a larger qualitative research study that illustrates the Hip Hop DJ as a twenty-first-century new media reader, writer, and literary critic, Craig blends interviews from prominent and influential DJs in the Hip Hop community with narrative and interdisciplinary scholarship from writing studies, Hip Hop studies, African American studies, urban education, and ethnomusicology. The voices of DJs sit front and center, presenting a revolutionary conversation about writing and communication in the twenty-first century.
Weaving Craig’s life experiences with important discussions of racial literacies, “K for the Way” is a layered and utterly singular exploration of culture, identity, and literacy in America.
Published September 2023
Utah State University Press

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023
A cutting-edge view of the digital humanities at a time of global pandemic, catastrophe, and uncertainty
Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 presents a state-of-the-field vision of digital humanities amid rising social, political, economic, and environmental crises; a global pandemic; and the deepening of austerity regimes in U.S. higher education. This fourth volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series provides a look not just at where DH stands but also where it is going.
Published July 2023
University of Minnesota Press
Recent Alumni and Student Publications
View all English Books
The Bathysphere Book
Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths
By Brad Fox (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
A wide ranging, philosophical, and sensual account of early deep sea exploration and its afterlives, The Bathysphere Book begins with the first ever voyage to the deep ocean in 1930 and expands to explore the adventures and entanglements of its all-too-human participants at a time when the world still felt entirely new.
In the summer of 1930, aboard a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, marine biologist Gloria Hollister sat on a crate, writing furiously in a notebook with a telephone receiver pressed to her ear. The phone line was attached to a steel cable that plunged 3,000 feet into the sea. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere. Crumpled inside, gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world, was Hollister’s colleague William Beebe. He called up to her, describing previously unseen creatures, explosions of bioluminescence, and strange effects of light and color.
From this momentous first encounter with the unknown depths, The Bathysphere Book widens its scope to explore a transforming and deeply paradoxical America, as the first great skyscrapers rose above New York City and the Great Plains baked to dust. In prose that is magical, atmospheric, and entirely engrossing, Brad Fox dramatizes new visions of our planetary home, delighting in tales of the colorful characters who surrounded, supported, and participated in the dives—from groundbreaking scientists and gallivanting adventurers to eugenicist billionaires.
The Bathysphere Book is a hypnotic assemblage of brief chapters along with over fifty full-color images, records from the original bathysphere logbooks, and the moving story of surreptitious romance between Beebe and Hollister that anchors their exploration. Brad Fox blurs the line between poetry and research, unearthing and rendering a visionary meeting with the unknown.
Published May 2023
Penguin Random House

Language and the Rise of the Algorithm
By Jeffrey M. Binder (Ph.D. in English, 2018)
A wide-ranging history of the algorithm.
Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians well before the computer age: How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? By attending to this question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day.
Here Binder offers a compelling tour of four visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole’s nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, erodes the line between technical and everyday language, revealing the urgent stakes underlying this boundary.
The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction.
Published November 2022
University of Chicago Press

Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella
By Charlie Markbreiter (Ph.D. candidate in English)
“Hey, Upper East Siders. Gossip Girl here. And I have the biggest news ever.” Every episode starts like this. We’re Upper East Siders; Gossip Girl tells us we are. But also, we aren’t and never will be. All we can do is look inside. Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella follows Gossip Girl, an anonymous blog, and the prep school students she reports on, who snitch on each other for likes. They include: Nate, beautiful transgender himbo, Bernie Madoff’s son; Serena (It Girl); Dan (vengeful alt nerd). Meanwhile, in the year 2030, Gordon (former TV protege) starts writing for Gossip Girl 3: the Reboot. Will he self-sabotage? Or…? Gossip Girl began as a YA book series; it was first published in 2002, one year into America’s War on Terror. Soon adapted for TV, Gossip Girl premiered on the CW network in 2007, swerving through the Financial Crash, and ending in 2012, midway through the Obama years. Interlaced with essays on transsexuality, clones, dissociating, American Apparel, and affect theorist Lauren Berlant, Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella is a parasocial eulogy for the aughts.
Published November 2022
Kenning Editions