English Department

News & Events

Junot Díaz
Troy Lecture

Pulitzer Prize recipient and MacArthur Fellow Junot Díaz gave our annual Troy lecture on November 1, 2012. Mr. Díaz read from his new work This is How You Lose Her and engaged the audience in a lively question-and-answer session on contemporary events and his philosophy of writing. Mr. Díaz also held special writing workshops attended by our undergraduate majors and students in the PhD and MFA programs.

Visiting Writers Series — Brenda Coultas & Sunetra Gupta — March 29th 8 PM Memorial Hall

Brenda Coultas is the author of The Marvelous Bones of Time and A Handmade Museum, which won the Norma Farber Award from The Poetry Society of America and a Greenwall Fund grant from the Academy of American Poets. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency, and recently served as visiting poet at Long Island University in Brooklyn New York.

Sunetra Gupta’s fifth novel, So Good in Black, was published in 2009. She is a winner of the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific achievements and is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University's Department of Zoology. Born in Calcutta, she wrote her first works of fiction in Bengali and is an accomplished translator of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.

Chair Introduction from Joseph Bartolomeo , Department Chair:

Welcome to the Department of English web page at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. We are a department of 43 faculty, approximately 800 majors, some 120 MA/Ph.D. and 75 MFA candidates.

As a Department, we aim to excel in teaching, writing, and study of the rich literature in English written in the United States and across the globe. We are also committed to having a diverse faculty and student body, recognizing our investment in the range of perspectives that diversity makes possible.

(Read Full Introduction From the Chair)

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Department of English University of Massachusetts, Amherst Bartlett Hall, Box 30515 Amherst, MA 01003-0515
Main Office: 170 Bartlett Hall Phone: 413.545.2332 Fax: 413.545.3880
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University of Massachusetts Amherst