English Department

News & Events

Natasha Trethewey '95 MFA, recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year, and Professor of English at Emory University, brought the vibrant voice of a storyteller to the podium at UMass Amherst. Speaking on February 9th in celebration of Black History Month, she was the Eleanor Bateman Scholar in Residence.

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)

Contact Us!

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
English Staff Contacts

University of Massachusetts Amherst