Creative Writing and Literature
Undergraduate Program
The Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree is designed for industry professionals with years of work experience who wish to complete their degrees part time, both on campus and online, without disruption to their employment. Our typical student is over 30, has previously completed one or two years of college, and works full time.
Students enrolled in the Master of Liberal Arts program in Creative Writing & Literature will develop skills in creative writing and literary analysis through literature courses and writing workshops in fiction, screenwriting, poetry, and nonfiction. Through online group courses and one-on-one tutorials, as well as a week on campus, students hone their craft and find their voice.
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Graduate Admissions
Program Description
Welcome from the director of graduate studies.
Teaching Fellows
Teaching fellow application and instructions ● listing of teaching fellow offices ● courses of instruction
Fellowships
Fellowship application information for Graduate Society Fellowships/Term Time Awards for Dissertation Research ● Harvard Merit Fellowships ● Harvard Research and Travel Fellowships ● GSAS Summer School Tuition Waiver Fellowships ● Dissertation Completion Fellowships.
Resources for Graduate Students
An internal website with an exhaustive listing of all the forms you will need as an English graduate student; it also contains Generals Lists, example language exams, example Fields Lists and example prospectuses.
The Committee of Graduate Students (COGS) consists of elected representatives who serve on decision-making committees in the department as well as in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Graduate Colloquia
Theater and Performance
Renaissance
Race and Ethnicity
Long 18th Century & Romanticism
Long 20th Century
Graduate Prizes
A full listing of English graduate prize submission guidelines and prize information.
Job Placement
A comprehensive list of recent job placements, current alumni positions, and a sampling of books from dissertations.
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Creative Writing
Creative Writing Master Class with Kadahj Bennett
About the creative writing thread.
The Creative Writing thread incorporates Poetry, Print Pressing (word art), Creative Writing, Screen and Script Writing, Fiction Writing, Comedic Improv, and much more. All students will be able to participate in the Creative Writing Masterclass, Keynote Speaker, and Information Session about curricular and extra-curricular Creative Writing opportunities at Harvard. We will also be offering some smaller form elective Workshops in the discipline.
Resident Artist: Kadahj Bennett
Kadahj is performer/writer/musician/spoken word artist. Recent credits include Tyler from THE HALLS (web series, Beyond Measure Productions), and Hank from HOW WE GOT ON (Company One). Kadahj is a Posse Scholar, graduate of Hamilton College and Boston Arts Academy alum. Currently a teaching artist in the Boston area, Kadahj moonlights as a lyricist/vocalist for two bands, Danceluja (Boston) & the Downbeat Keys (Brooklyn).
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Creative Writing Tips from Harvard’s Faculty
Harvard’s English faculty hosts a powerhouse of acclaimed creative writers. As lecturers and professors, they devote countless hours to passing on the skills of their craft to students. The Crimson asked four faculty members who teach fiction-writing classes to share their creative writing wisdom.
“You can make an entire world up in your head and transmit it to other people with scribbles on a page,” said Claire Messud, a Senior Lecturer. “Making up stories is open to all of us.” While not every Harvard student will have the opportunity to take their classes, anyone can try their hand at creative writing.
Start small, and make time to write.
Paul Yoon, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, in an email: Start small. Oftentimes when we have an “idea” to write something, we’re operating on a level that is somewhat abstract and leans on the bigger picture. How to begin a story you want to tell? I like starting with just one sentence or focusing on an object or a specific detail, like describing setting or one character trait. Just that. Go micro, focus. Start small. And go step by step from there.
Claire Messud, Senior Lecturer: Learning the habit of making time for writing is the challenge for many people. Almost everybody makes time to exercise now. It’s just the same—you can say, I’m going to sit at my desk for an hour, or write until I have 200 words. You just make a plan. If you do something several times a week for weeks and months, you will get better at it.
Imagine the iceberg, not just the tip.
CM: It isn’t just about figuring out a plot and characters. It’s about really imagining the world, circumstances, and particularities of those characters and that situation—not just what’s going to appear on the page, but the entire world. Hemingway speaks about the tip of the iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is what the story is, but there’s an entire iceberg under the water. You have to make the iceberg to make the story.
Revise for clarity.
Laura M. van den Berg, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, in an email: In my experience, a common struggle for students is the discomfort of sitting with the uncertainty of the first draft—i.e. I’m not sure where this story is going, I don’t know what this character is up to, I don’t know how it will end . Sometimes students worry that this not-knowing is a sign that they’re doing something wrong, when the not-knowing is very often an essential part of the process.
I tend to write my own drafts very quickly and messily and intuitively—and then spend a lot of time re-shaping and re-casting and re-imagining. In the first draft, the most important question I ask myself is “Why not?“ For every draft after the first, the question is, “Why?”
CM: Revision is really at least 50 percent of the work. Some of the things to think about: How much of what’s in my head have I conveyed on the paper? Have I been clear? It’s great to be beautiful or lyrical or inventive, but none of it matters if you haven’t expressed clearly what you wanted to express. The process of revision is about a clarification and a distillation. If you have three scenes, each of which does one thing, can you figure out a way to have one scene that will do all three things?
Read as if living depended on it.
Jamaica Kincaid, Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence, in an email: It is more important that you read than to write because when you are writing you have first read what you are writing before you write it. So the best thing, so it seems to me, for a writer is to read as if living depended on it. Nothing else really matters.
LMV: If you want to write poems or short stories or essays or novels, it is critically important to have read deeply in the genre—from the canon to what the canon has missed to what’s being written right now to everything in-between. And of course writers should also read expansively, roaming outside the genres they themselves work in.
PY: Always be open to inspiration. “Best American Short Stories” is a fantastic anthology. In terms of literary magazines, I think my current favorite, the ones that feel bold and ambitious and the ones I consistently want to pick up are: Tin House, A Public Space, and Ecotone. Books and stories are our best teachers.
Take your time during the publishing process.
LMV: Take your time getting to know the landscape. Read literary magazines and get a feel for who regularly publishes work that you love. Pay attention to where writers you admire have published/are publishing their work. Make sure you have given your work everything you have before you send it out into the world—an editor (almost always) is only going to read the piece once. Mightily resist the urge to rush.
No writing is wasted.
CM: No writing is a waste of time. You can always write better, and any writing you do is going to teach you how to write. You just have to dive in. You have to be unafraid. The language is ours. What a great freedom.
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Writing Courses
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Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking
Gain critical communication skills in writing and public speaking with this introduction to American political rhetoric.
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HES Creative Writing & Literature Society
The HESCWLS seeks to provide a home base for Harvard Extension students in the ALM Creative Writing and Literature degree program, welcoming all disciplines engaging in the creative literary process. Our society offerings include live and virtual events fueling professional development in the form of writing workshops, critique circles, skill development seminars and webinars, and book clubs. Through a network of global ambassadors and state representatives, we strive to provide a collaborative structure that fosters community among society members across the globe.
Our society exists to support the academic and professional development of ALM Creative Writing and Literature students, welcoming writers from across all disciplines to share resources, collaboration, and networking opportunities toward success in their creative writing life at Harvard and beyond. The goals of our organization and supporting activities include:
- Resources to support academic success in the Creative Writing and Literature program
- Socializing with like-minded students, faculty, and professionals
- Partnering with organizations within and outside the Harvard community
- Contributing to a more thriving creative community for HES distance learners
- Building real-world knowledge, skills, and experiences through writing groups, book clubs, and workshops and seminars that support writing development and publication.
Harvard Undergraduate Creative Writing Collective
Become part of our vibrant community..
The Harvard Undergraduate Creative Writing Collective is concerned with filling the gap in the creative writing community on Harvard’s campus. Through mentorship, drop-in hours, networking events, book clubs, workshop events, speaker series, and service opportunities, we ultimately seek to create a radically inclusive, tight-knit community for writers of all kinds on campus (& beyond), by: • Providing support and accountability for writers working on projects • Connecting writers with publishers, nonprofits, grants, and each other • Organizing writing & non-writing related events & programming • Partnering with other creative orgs at Harvard • Serving the greater Boston community
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Connnections
Meeting new students with shared interest
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Harvard Undergraduate Creative Writing Collective Cambridge Massachusetts United States
In the Department of English , students think about, study and write about the artful ways in which people can and do use words, from thousand-year-old epics about fighting monsters to the intimate poems and the public addresses of our own time. The department is also the academic home at Harvard for creative writers and creative writing. Undergraduates may pursue a Concentration and Secondary Field.
Director of Undergraduate Studies: Daniel Donoghue Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies: Anna Wilson Undergraduate Program Administrator: Lauren Bimmler Undergraduate Program Assistant and Secondary Field Coordinator: Emily Miller
Gateway Courses
English 10. Literature Today Stephanie Burt All literature was contemporary at some point, but the literature that is contemporary now provides special opportunities for enjoying, questioning, and understanding the world. Literature Today focuses on works written since 2000—since most of you were born. It explores how writers from around the world speak to and from their personal and cultural situations, addressing current problems of economic inequality, technological change, structural prejudice, and divisive politics. We will encounter a range of genres, media, and histories to study contemporary literature as a living, evolving system. The course uniquely blends literary study and creative writing—students will analyze literature and make literature. The conviction that these practices are complementary will inform our approach to readings and course assignments. Note: English 10 is one of the required Common Courses for the English concentrators. The course is designed as a “gateway” course for first and second year students, but it is open to all undergraduates.
If a prospective student has a schedule conflict with English 10, they might instead explore the following courses:
English 191rw. Reading for Fiction Writers Neel Mukherjee and Laura van den Berg Enrollment: Limited to 45 students (If interested, please submit an enrollment petition as soon as possible!)
There is no writing without reading. This is an unimpeachable and incontrovertible fact that all writers know. Ask any writer why they became a writer, and they'll tell you that it's because they read. Octavia Butler, who came from a poor family, once said that she became a writer because she had access to public libraries. Books, in other words; they showed her what was possible. What kind of training in reading prepares one to become a writer? This is an open-enrollment creative writing course that will introduce you to some extraordinary writers who will inspire you, make you think, make you quarrel with them, fill you with wonder and awe and, sometimes, bafflement. It is by no means representative in any way, nor is it exhaustive, nor does it have any historical ordering. It is meant to be a stepping-stone to possibilities, to greater imaginative and creative worlds.
The list is diverse in terms of genres. We will read sci-fi (Ursula K. Le Guin, Butler), fairytale inspired fiction (Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi), metaphysical fiction (Leo Tolstoy), realist fiction (Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant). We will consider fiction through the lens of race and gender and politics (Mavis Gallant, Edward P. Jones, Vivek Shanbagh, Annie Ernaux), and read several writers who wrote in languages other than English (Anton Chekhov, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar). We will learn how to read closely, to interpret stories and novels, to figure out what literary works mean and, most importantly, how they embody their meanings in form. We will look at the wide spectrum of effects writers create in their texts. We will also be asking ourselves throughout the semester: How do writers read other writers? What are the technical things they look out for when they are reading? These conversations will, in turn, inform the creative work you generate this semester.
This class will be co-taught by two creative writing faculty members, Professors Laura van den Berg and Neel Mukherjee. The lecture component of the course will meet twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays, for 75 minutes per session; one of those classes will be largely devoted to craft Q & A and workshopping student writing. You will also meet for an hour-long section (separate from the weekly lectures) each week where you'll have the opportunity to do your own creative writing. This will involve writing exercises, imitations of writers we will be reading, flash fiction, and other writing prompts.
English 145a. Jane Austen's Fiction and Fans Deidre Lynch When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Jane Austen began to write, the novel was still liable to be dismissed by serious readers and writers on both moral and aesthetic grounds. Austen’s achievement helped to transform the genre, helping establish fiction as the form that (paradoxically enough) explains reality and as the form that explains us to ourselves. In this class we'll read all six of Austen’s novels and study the contribution they made to the remaking of modern fiction. Though our emphasis will fall on these works’ place in the literary culture of Austen’s day and on their historical contexts in an era of political, social, and literary revolution, we’ll also acknowledge the strong and ardent feelings that Austen’s oeuvre continues to arouse today. To that end, we’ll do some investigating of the frequently wild world of contemporary Austen fandom and the Austenian tourism, shopping, adaptations, and sequels that nurture it. At the same time, we’ll also remember that Austen knew fandom from both sides; part of our work this semester will be to learn about the early-nineteenth-century cultures of literary appreciation in which Austen both enrolled the heroines of her fiction and enrolled herself. Note: This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Freshman Seminar 33x. Complexity in Works of Art: Ulysses and Hamlet Philip Fisher Is the complexity, the imperfection, the difficulty of interpretation, the unresolved meaning found in certain great and lasting works of literary art a result of technical experimentation? Or is the source extreme complexity—psychological, metaphysical, or spiritual? Does it result from limits within language, or from language’s fit to thought and perception? Do the inherited forms found in literature permit only certain variations within experience to reach lucidity? Is there a distinction in literature between what can be said and what can be read? The members of the seminar will investigate the limits literature faces in giving an account of mind, everyday experience, thought, memory, full character, and situation in time. The seminar will make use of a classic case of difficulty, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and a modern work of unusual complexity and resistance to both interpretation and to simple comfortable reading, Joyce’s Ulysses. Reading in exhaustive depth these two works will suggest the range of meanings for terms like complexity, resistance, openness of meaning, and experimentation within form.
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Harvard College Writing Program
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ADMINISTRATION
Thomas Jehn
Sosland Director of the Harvard College Writing Program
Fields: English Literature and Academic Writing
Research and Writing Interests : Secondary school and college writing pedagogy, Institutional histories of literary studies, academic activism, and 60s culture
Tom Jehn is the Sosland Director of the Harvard College Writing Program, where he has taught and administered for more than 20 years. He has served on the Standing Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid, the Committee on Academic Integrity, and the Ad Hoc Committee on Writing and Speaking. He has directed the Harvard Writing Project, a professional development and publications program for faculty members and graduate student instructors across the disciplines at the University. He designed and oversaw Harvard’s first community outreach writing and speaking program at the Harvard Allston Education Portal, where he now serves as a member of its Advisory Board. He has also directed the writing center for Harvard’s Extension School. He has been a contributing author for a series of best-selling composition textbooks published by Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. As the program officer and board member for the Calderwood Writing Initiative at the Boston Athenaeum, an arts and education charity, he designed and led financing for university-partnered writing centers at eight Boston city high schools serving more than 3,000 students. He has taught numerous professional development courses on writing pedagogy for secondary school and college instructors across the country and has collaborated with the National Writing Project. He also advises university writing programs and conducts communications training for companies and non-profits. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MA and a PhD in English from the University of Virginia.
Karen Heath
Associate Director of the Harvard College Writing Program
Senior Preceptor
Fields: Creative Writing and Literature
Research and Writing Interests : Fiction
Karen Heath received her MFA in fiction from Indiana University and her EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is a Senior Preceptor in the Harvard College Writing Program, where she works on issues of program pedagogy and faculty development, as well as the Associate Director of the program. She is the course head for Expos Studio 10. She also teaches fiction writing at the Harvard Extension School.
James Herron
Director, Harvard Writing Project
Fields: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology
Research and Writing Interests : Pragmatics, linguistics, Latin America, Colombia, political economy, race, class
James is director of the Harvard Writing Project and has taught at Harvard since 2004. He has a PhD in cultural and linguistic anthropology from the University of Michigan. At Harvard he has taught courses on Latin American history and culture, the anthropology of race, social class, capitalism, "the culture of the market," ethnographic and qualitative research methods, and anthropological linguistics. Herron has held research fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others.
Jane Rosenzweig
Director, Harvard Writing Center
Field: Creative Writing
Research and Writing Interests : Fiction, cultural criticism
Jane Rosenzweig holds a BA from Yale University, an MLitt from Oxford, and an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has been a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly and a member of the fiction staff at the New Yorker . Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train , Seventeen , The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories , The American Prospect , the Boston Globe , the Boston Phoenix , Utne Reader , and The Chronicle Review . She is the director of the Harvard College Writing Center.
Rebecca Skolnik
Assistant Director of Administration for the Academic Resource Center and the Harvard College Writing Program
Rebecca Skolnik manages all Program budgets and payroll; faculty and staff appointments and re-appointments; technology needs for Program administration and faculty; and Program operations.
Aubrey Everett
Program Coordinator, Harvard College Writing Program
Aubrey Everett provides the Writing Program’s faculty and leadership team with overall support, primarily in the areas of course registration, the Writing Exam, Harvard Writing Project and Writing Center, digital projects, various curricular initiatives, and faculty development events and resources. Her background is in print journalism and she has experience working in both publishing and higher education.
Gregory Collins
Staff Assistant, Harvard College Writing Program
Gregory Collins manages all onsite operations, departmental communications, and hiring processes. His background is in creative writing and communications. He has worked with the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, The New School MFA Program, WHYY Public Radio, and the Playwrights' Center.
Fields: Near Eastern Studies, Comparative Literature, Orality, Scripture & Literary Theory
Research and Writing Interests : Comparative Religion, International Law, Linguistics, Fiction, and Children’s Literature
Sheza Alqera holds an honors degree in English and Economics from Brown University (BA) graduating Magna cum Laude, and a Masters from Harvard Divinity School (MTS). She is presently completing her PhD in Near Eastern Studies and Civilizations (NELC) from Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard College Writing Program, Sheza worked as a Writing Tutor for the Harvard Extension Writing Program for over three years, and more recently, as a Departmental Writing Fellow and Senior Thesis Advisor for the College. She has been awarded Certificates of Excellence in Teaching by Harvard University's Derek Bok Center and has served as a liaison between faculty, staff, and students in her role as Student Representative and member of the Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) Committee for her program.
Fields: History of Science; Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Research and Writing Interests : Nineteenth-century transatlantic history; Victorian medicine & science; women & gender in science
Katie Baca completed her MA and PhD in the History of Science at Harvard with a secondary field in WGS. Her research focuses on the intersections of nineteenth century science and studies of women, gender, and sexuality. She has worked for the Darwin and Tyndall Correspondence Projects. Before entering academia, Baca worked in equity research. She received her AB from Harvard College in History and Science with a secondary field in Economics.
Doug Bafford
Fields: Anthropology
Research and Writing Interests: Anthropology of religion; evangelical Christianity; epistemology; conservatism; language and culture; race and multiculturalism; contested authority; creationism; South Africa
Website: https://www.dougbafford.com
Doug Bafford is a cultural anthropologist who studies the intersection of religion, authority, and language in Southern Africa. His recent ethnographic research projects trace changes within evangelical Christianity in post-apartheid South Africa, the semiotics of young-earth creationism in the United States, and the dynamics of conservative responses to racism. This work centers on how Christians produce knowledge and authority amid rapid social transformation and is currently being developed into a monograph examining the ambiguous role of culture in conservative lifeworlds. He has taught undergraduate courses in anthropology, expository writing, and interdisciplinary social sciences at several institutions, most recently at the College of the Holy Cross. Originally from Maryland, he received a PhD in anthropology from Brandeis University, with undergraduate degrees from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Carroll Community College.
Erika Bailey
Fields: Theater, Voice, Public Speaking
Research and Writing Interests: Rhetoric, Teaching and Performance, Dialect and Accent Acquisition
Erika Bailey is the Head of Voice and Speech at American Repertory Theater and is a long-time faculty member of the Theater, Dance, and Media concentration at Harvard. She also serves as a member of the Committee on Commencement Parts, choosing student speakers for commencement, and is a faculty advisor at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. She has taught voice and speech classes at Princeton University, the Juilliard School, Williams College, and Boston Conservatory among others. She gives workshops across the schools of Harvard University on public speaking and performance. She holds a BA from Williams College, an MFA from Brandeis University and an MA in Voice Studies from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
Pat Bellanca
Fields: English and American Literature
Research and Writing Interests : Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature; Gothic fiction; critical theory; journalism.
Pat Bellanca holds degrees in English from Wellesley College (B A ) and Rutgers University (M A, PhD). In addition to teaching in the Harvard College Writing Program, where she is a Head Preceptor, she directs the master’s degree programs in journalism and in creative writing at Harvard's Division of Continuing Education. She is also co-author of The Short Guide to College Writing , currently in its fifth edition.
Collier Brown
Field: American Studies
Research and Writing Interests: Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Literature; Form and Theory of Poetry; Aesthetics of Waste and Wastelands; History of Photography
Website: http://scbrownjr.com
Collier Brown is a poet, photography critic, and literary scholar. He holds a PhD in American Studies from Harvard and an MFA in Poetry from McNeese State University. Brown’s essays on photography have appeared in more than twenty books, including Eyemazing : The New Collectible Art Photography (Thames & Hudson) and Beth Moon’s Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time (Abbeville Press). His latest poetry collection, Scrap Bones , is out now with Texas Review Press.
Kate Clarke
Kate has worked in the fields of theater and education for over twenty years. She has taught in the Theater Departments at Salem State University and the Boston Conservatory. She worked for the educational branch of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and has worked extensively in organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club of Boston and the Mayor’s Program, developing classes that focus on promoting communication skills in at-risk youth. Overseas, Kate has co-developed and directed theater/writing programs for projects in Jordan, Palestine and Israel. Kate holds an MFA in Theater Arts from Brandeis University and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Nick Coburn-Palo
Field: Political Science
Research and Writing Interests: International Diplomacy, Conflict Resolution, Political Rhetoric, and American Political Development
Nick Coburn-Palo earned his M A and PhD from Brown University in Political Science. He has over thirty years of instructional and lecturing experience at independent schools and universities on four continents, including Yale University (as a Program Dean for International Security Studies), the Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona), San Jose State University, and the Taipei American School. He has longstanding professional relationships with the United Nations (UNITAR), including work at the Security Council level, as well as with a leading continental economic think tank, European House – Ambrosetti, where he will be delivering a lecture series in Turin and Milan this fall. His academic interests include celebrity politics, East Asian security studies, and leadership training. He also teaches graduate courses in Management and Government for the Harvard Extension School.
Field: American Literature
Research and Writing Interests : Political novels, history and theory of the novel, American studies
Tad Davies received his PhD in English from University of California, Irvine and before coming to Harvard taught an array of literary and cultural studies courses at Bryant University. His academic interests lay in the intersection between literature and politics—particularly as they meet in the U.S. of the 1960s.
Margaret Deli
Research and Writing Interests : 19th- and 20th-century English and American literature, aesthetic expertise, museum studies, celebrity studies
Maggie completed her MA and PhD in English Language and Literature from Yale University. Her research focuses on art, snobs, and expertise. She received her BA from Johns Hopkins University and holds degrees in English and American Studies and the History of Art and Art-World Practice from Oxford and Christie's Education London respectively.
Samuel Garcia
Fields: History
Research and Writing Interests : Early Modern Europe (Spain in particular); Colonial Latin America; Religious History; Protestant and Catholic Reformations; History of Witchcraft and Magic
Samuel García is a historian of early modern Europe and colonial Latin America. He holds a PhD in History from Yale University, a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) degree from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA from St. John’s College (Annapolis). His research interests include topics such as the Spanish Inquisition, witchcraft and magic, and the development of early modern Catholicism. His current project is about the use of exile as a punishment by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Prior to Harvard, he taught at Wesleyan University (History Dept. and College of Letters) and, most recently, in the Princeton Writing Program.
Joseph Gauvreau
Field: Comparative Literature
Research and Writing Interests: 16th-Century Literature and Music; Lyric Poetry; Performance Studies; Translation
Joseph Gauvreau holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and a BA from Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of music and literature in Early Modern Europe, particularly on the many ways in which songs were used (and abused) as they circulated through society and across boundaries of language, culture, and confession. He is also a singer and violinist, and is dedicated to integrating performance into his scholarship.
Terry Gipson
Fields: Public Speaking, Communications, Public Relations, Visual Arts, Political Communication
Research and Writing Interests : Art and Perception, Political Communication
Website: https://www.terrygipsonny.com
Terry Gipson has over 25 years of experience in communications, public relations, government affairs, marketing, mass media, experiential design, and he is a former New York State Senator. He previously served as a Director for MTV Networks where he collaborated with producers to develop live shows and promotional events for MTV and Nickelodeon. Terry is a regular commentator on the WAMC Public Radio Roundtable and teaches public relations and strategic communication for Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education. Before coming to Harvard, he taught public speaking, public relations, political communication, persuasion, and campaign communication as a lecturer at the State University of New York at New Paltz and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His interest in using art as a communication teaching tool has been featured on the Academic Minute and published in Communication Teacher. Terry has an MFA in Theatre Arts from Pennsylvania State University and a BFA in Theatre Arts from Texas Tech University. In addition, he is a member of the National Communication Association and the Public Relations Society of America.
J. Gregory Given
Fields: Study of Religion, Classics
Research and Writing Interests : Early Christianity, late antiquity, Coptic language and literature, ancient letter collections, history of scholarship
Greg Given is a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, with broad interests in the development of Christian literature and culture from the second to sixth centuries CE. His current book project focuses on the various collections of letters attributed to the second-century martyr-bishop Ignatius of Antioch. He holds a PhD from Harvard in the Study of Religion, a MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA in Classics and Religion from Reed College. Prior to joining the Writing Program, he held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Virginia and also taught courses at the University of Mary Washington, Stonehill College, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Divinity School.
Alexandra (AJ) Gold
Research and Writing Interests : post-1945 American poetry and visual art; visual-verbal collaborations; gender studies; popular culture; critical pedagogy
Website : www.alexandrajgold.com
Alexandra Gold received her PhD in English from Boston University. She earned a BA in English and Political Science and MA in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Harvard, she taught course in writing composition, gender studies, and poetry at Drexel and Boston Universities and worked as a tutor in BU’s Writing Center. Her writing and research focuses on post-45 American poetry and visual art, a subject that also informs her book, The Collaborative Artists' Book: Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art (University of Iowa, Contemporary North American Poetry Series, 2023). In addition to work her in Expos, she also serves as a first-year academic advisor in the college.
Ethan Goldberg
Fields: Literature, Film, Urban Studies, Creative Writing
Research and Writing Interests : Post-1945 Literature, Film, and Culture; The City; Literature and Psychology; Visual and Media Culture; Continental Philosophy and Theory
Ethan Goldberg completed his PhD in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He has taught English and core humanities courses at Queens College, Lehman College, and NYU, as well as English language classes in Madrid. His research focuses on the representation of cities in contemporary literature and film. He has also published English translations of Spanish-language poetry, and is currently working on an urban, autotheoretical work in the style of Walter Benjamin and Olivia Laing.
Field: Cultural Anthropology
Research and Writing Interests : Multispecies relations, care, race, affect, cuteness, wildlife conservation, chimpanzees, postcolonism, Africa
Amy Hanes is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on multispecies relationships between humans and great apes and the politics of wildlife conservation in Central and West Africa. Important themes in her work include care, race, affect, and cuteness. She earned her PhD in Anthropology and her dual MA in Sustainable International Development and Women’s and Gender Studies from Brandeis University. Apart from academia, she has worked as a development editor and with non-governmental organizations in youth education, wildlife conservation, and gender-based violence prevention in the U.S., Niger, the Central African Republic, and Cameroon. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Jodi Johnson
Fields: British, Irish, Italian, and American Literature; Creative Writing
Research and Writing Interests : The History of Poetry; Creative Writing; Renaissance and Restoration Literature; Victorian Literature; Risorgimento Literature; American Literature; and Irish Literature.
Jodi Johnson is a poet and literary scholar from Ireland. He was educated at Oxford (BA), the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (MFA), and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (PhD), where his dissertation focused on spectral image formation in Renaissance literature. He is a Poetry Editor at Tampa Review , and his work has appeared in The Nation , Prelude , and elsewhere. Prior to Harvard, he taught in the writing departments of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Tampa, the University of South Florida, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. His research is particularly interested in developmental poetics, creative writing, and phenomenology .
Jonah Johnson
Fields: German Studies and Comparative Literature
Research and Writing Interests : Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment German literature and philosophy, lyric, genre theory, reception of classical antiquity
Jonah Johnson received his PhD in German and Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 2009. His research focuses on the relationship between literature and philosophy, particularly among German thinkers in the decades following the French Revolution. He is currently working on a book project in which he follows the emergence of tragedy as a discursive strategy within post-Kantian philosophy and explores the consequences of this discourse for early Romantic drama. He has taught courses on literature and culture in the German Department and Great Books Program at Michigan. He holds a BA in Ancient Greek Language and Literature from Oberlin College.
Hannah Kauders
Fields: Creative Writing, Translation
Research and Writing Interests : Translation Theory and Craft, Comparative Literature, 20th and 21st Century Latin American and Iberian Literature, Contemporary American Literature, Applied Linguistics
Hannah holds an MFA in writing and literary translation from Columbia University. Before coming to Harvard, she taught in the University Writing program at Columbia and the department of Comparative Literature at Barnard College. Her fiction and essays appear in The Drift , Astra Magazine , Gulf Coast Magazine , Fiction International , and more, and she is currently editing a memoir about the intersection of grief and translation. She translates from Spanish with a focus on contemporary Colombian fiction and poetry, queer narratives, and cross-genre literature. .
Katherine Kennedy
Field : English & American Literature; Politics, Policy, and Negotiation
Research and Writing Interests: British 18th and 19th Century Literature, American 19th and 20th Century Literature, Children's Literature, Romantic Poetry, the Novel, Gender Studies, LGBTQIA+ Studies, Policy, Negotiation
Katherine Kennedy received a PhD in English and American Literature from Rutgers University, an AB from Harvard College, an MA from the University of Utah, and, most recently, an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her interests are British Romantic and Victorian literature, American nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, children’s literature, policy analysis, negotiation, and leadership. Her dissertation focused on representations of women’s bodies in British literature from 1770-1840. Before coming to the Harvard Kennedy School, she served as an elected member of the Salt Lake City School Board for eight years. After receiving her MPA, she was a fellow in the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Collaboratory at the Center for Public Leadership. She has taught writing and literature at Rutgers, the University of Utah, and Randolph College and coached negotiators at Harvard.
Isabel Lane
Fields: Comparative Literature, Environmental Humanities
Research and Writing Interests : Russian and American twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction; energy production and nuclear technologies in literature and culture; environmental humanities; prison and incarceration.
Isabel Lane holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University and a BA in Russian Studies from NYU. Before coming to Harvard, she taught literature and writing at Yale and the Bard Prison Initiative, and she was the founding director of the Boston College Prison Education Program. Isabel's scholarly research focuses on cultural representations of energy production and use (especially nuclear), intersecting human and environmental harm, and incarceration. In parallel with her scholarly research, she is currently working on a public humanities project, Products of Our Environment ( ofourenvironment.org ), that brings together people inside and outside of prison around environmental justice and the arts.
Taleen Mardirossian
Fields: Creative Writing
Research and Writing Interests : Histories of violence, human rights, race, memory, gender, identity
Taleen Mardirossian holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she’s taught undergraduate writing. In the early part of her career, she studied law and worked in the legal field with a concentration in criminal law. From teaching street law to creative writing, she has extensive experience designing courses for students in her local community and abroad. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the body and identity.
Ross Martin
Fields: Early and Antebellum U.S. American ideas and culture
Research and Writing Interests : Nineteenth-century science, philosophy, and law
Ross Martin received his PhD from the University of Michigan where, prior to teaching in the Harvard College Writing Program, he was a Frederick Donald Sober Postdoctoral Fellow. As a scholar he focuses on U.S. American intellectual history up to 1865, specializing in the comparative study of philosophical, scientific, and legal ideas.
Keating McKeon
Fields: Classics, Achaemenid Persia
Research and Writing Interests : Ancient autocracy, generic intertextuality, Attic tragedy
Keating McKeon holds his PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard and completed his undergraduate studies in Classics at Columbia and the University of Cambridge. His research is especially concerned with the manifestations and receptions of autocracy in the ancient world. Keating’s current projects approach these concepts from two perspectives: the first probes the role of nostalgia in democratic Athenian constructions of autocracy, while the second explores how epic models for rulership are mediated through the act of Homeric quotation across Greco-Roman antiquity. Keating has published on the Greek adaptation of Old Persian sources as well as on the historian Herodotus’ narrative interest in the performative manipulation of time.
Shannon Monaghan
Fields: History
Research and Writing Interests : Military history; modern Europe; war and society
Shannon Monaghan earned degrees in History from Yale (BA) and Boston College (MA, PhD). Her academic interests are in the history of modern warfare, and her teaching emphasizes the use of a wide range of primary sources. She is the author of A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men , which follows a group of British special operations soldiers throughout the Second World War and Cold War (Viking/Penguin Random House, Sept. 2024). Hurst will publish her next book, To Die With Such Men: Frontline Stories From Ukraine’s International Legion , in February 2025. Dr. Monaghan is also the author of Protecting Democracy from Dissent: Population Engineering in Western Europe 1918-1926 (Routledge, 2018). She maintains a long-term project on the history of shell shock and combat stress.
Field: Public Speaking
Research and Writing Interests : Dramaturgy; Theatre History; Performance; Personal Storytelling
Website : https://www.phillipjamesmontano.com/
James Montaño is a dramaturg, educator, critic, and playwright. He has taught theater and public speaking at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Brandeis University. He has also worked in literary management and special projects producer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and in education and community engagement at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. He has served as a dramaturg for productions at ART, Harvard University, and Boston Conservatory as well as freelance projects around New England, New Mexico, and Texas. His artistic training is from UMass Amherst, ART/Harvard, and the Moscow Art Theatre. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance as Public Practice at The University of Texas at Austin.
Cody Musselman
Field: Religious Studies
Research and Writing Interests: Ethnography of Religion; American religious history; popular culture; sports, fitness, and wellness; religious and social theory; consumerism and capitalism.
Website: https://codymusselman.squarespace.com
Cody Musselman is a scholar of American religion. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Before coming to Harvard, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on religion in the contemporary U.S., consumerism, popular culture, and health wellness. Her writing has appeared in Religion Dispatches, The Conversation, and the journal Religions. She is currently writing a book about religion in American fitness culture.
Ryan Napier
Field: British literature
Research and Writing Interests : Nineteenth-century literature; contemporary fiction; theory of the novel; religion and literature
Ryan Napier holds a PhD in English from Tufts University and an MAR in religion and literature from Yale Divinity School. His writing has appeared in Jacobin , and a collection of his short fiction, Four Stories about the Human Face , is available from Bull City Press.
Lee Nishri-Howitt
Field: Voice, Speech, Accents, Shakespeare, Theater
Lee Nishri-Howitt teaches and coaches vocal production, speech, accent acquisition, and Shakespearean text. He has taught in the Theater, Dance, and Media concentration at Harvard, and at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Emerson College, and the Moscow Art Theatre School. As a coach, he has worked with the American Repertory Theater, Huntington Theatre, New Repertory Theatre, SpeakEasy Stage Company, and others. Lee is a graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, and of the masters program in vocal pedagogy at the American Repertory Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard.
Field: Creative Writing and Literature
Ben Parson received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught first year writing with the UMass Writing Program as well as courses in creative writing for both the UMass English department and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers. Since then, Ben has taught literature and writing at a private boarding school for learning diverse students. His short fiction has been published in The Cape Cod Poetry Review , and he is currently working on a novel.
Brian Pietras
Field: Literature; history; gender and sexuality studies
Research and Writing Interests : Medieval and early modern literature; the history of sexuality; feminist and queer theory; twentieth-century LGBTQ+ cultures
Pietras holds a PhD in English Literature from Rutgers University. His scholarly articles have been published in The Journal of the History of Sexuality , Renaissance Drama , Spenser Studies , and elsewhere.
Trained as an early modernist, his work on the history of sexuality has led to a new project that investigates queer life in America before Stonewall. Prior to coming to Harvard, he taught in the Writing Program and Freshman Seminars Program at Princeton.
MG Prezioso
Field: Education, Children's and Young Adult Literature
Research and Writing Interests: Story World Absorption, Reading Motivation and Engagement, Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Philosophy of Literature, English Literature/Language Arts Education, Psychology of Reading, Literature and Ethics, Literature and Civic Engagement, Literature and Climate Awareness
Website: www.mgprezioso.com
MG Prezioso received her PhD in Education from Harvard University, her EdM in Language and Literacy from Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and her AB in English literature from Harvard College. Her research focuses on children's story world absorption - how children become “lost,” or immersed, in stories - and how absorptive reading can be leveraged in K-12 education to improve reading outcomes. Her academic work has been featured in Education Week, The Boston Globe, and The Harvard Gazette. MG is also a children's book author, and her first series—picture books for kids with chronic conditions and food allergies—launched in 2023.
Kelsey Quigley
Field: Clinical Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Psychophysiology
Research and Writing Interests : Clinical and developmental psychology, stress and trauma, resilience, psychophysiology, parenting, gender
Kelsey Quigley completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Penn State University, with secondary fields in Developmental Psychology and Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience. In her research, she examines biobehavioral pathways by which early adversity influences health outcomes. In the clinic, she works primarily with children, women, and gender-expansive individuals who have experienced stress or trauma. Quigley has taught courses in the Harvard and Penn State Psychology Departments and as part of the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies. She has worked previously as an Early Childhood Mental Health consultant and a Federal Policy Analyst at Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families in Washington, DC. She earned her AB in Social Studies at Harvard University.
Emilie J. Raymer
Field: The History and Philosophy of Science
Research and Writing Interests : the modern life and environmental sciences, evolutionary theory, intellectual history, philosophy
Emilie holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University, where she taught classes offered through the Program in Behavioral Biology, the Department of the History of Science and Technology, and the Program in Expository Writing. Her scholarly interests include the development of the modern life sciences, evolutionary theory, the environmental humanities, and the philosophy of science. At Harvard, she teaches writing courses focused on biomedical and environmental ethics. She also serves as the faculty director of the Writing and Public Service Initiative and on the Board of First-Year Advisers. She worked for the National Academy of Sciences before she began her doctorate.
Field: Government
Research and Writing Interests : International relations, women and politics, political psychology, group-based violence, survey experiments
Website : www.sparshasaha.com
Sparsha Saha received her PhD and MA from the Department of Government at Harvard, and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines the causes of severe protest policing violence in Iran since 1979, and her current research focuses on the effects of gender and dress on women in politics and society.
John Sampson
Fields: American literature
Research and Writing Interests: Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture; urban history; composition and writing center studies.
John Sampson holds a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University. He has published articles in NOVEL , American Literary Realism , and the Henry James Review . He also has a book chapter forthcoming in Paris in the Americas , an interdisciplinary edited volume, which traces the French influences on the built environment of Washington, D.C. Before coming to Harvard, he served as Director of the Johns Hopkins Writing Center and was a writing instructor and administrator with the West Point Writing Program.
Research and Writing Interests: Nonfiction, autofiction, satire, and cultural criticism
Ian holds an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and BA degrees in History and Italian Studies from Brown University. Before coming to Harvard, he taught courses on creative nonfiction and rhetoric at the University of Iowa and helped lead the Brown University Writing Fellows Program. His work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books , DIAGRAM , Atlas Obscura , and Artsy , among other publications. He is a native of St. Paul, Minnesota.
Gillian Sinnott
Field: Law; political theory
Research and Writing Interests: Constitutional law; theories of liberalism; privacy
Gillian Sinnott received her undergraduate degree from University College Dublin. She also has an MPhil from the University of Oxford and an SJD from Harvard Law School. Her doctoral dissertation examined the application of the political philosophy of John Rawls to questions in constitutional law. Prior to joining the Writing Program, she practiced law in New York and London.
Stephen Spencer
Field: English Literature
Research and Writing Interests: Early modern literature; Gender, sexuality, and affect studies; Utopian/dystopian literature; History of science fiction
Stephen Spencer is a scholar-teacher focusing on early modern literature. He holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research investigates the gender(ed) politics of religious affect in Milton and his contemporaries. He has published on John Donne's figuration of the hermaphrodite and Andrew Marvell's poetry of weeping.
Tracy Strauss
Field: Creative Writing, Literature, and Film
Research and Writing Interests: trauma literature and film, the bildungsroman, prose and poetry of war, screenplay as dramatic literature, literary adaptations, public humanities
Tracy Strauss holds an MFA in Film from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She is the author of I Just Haven’t Met You Yet , a memoir that landed on Harvard Bookstore’s “Bestseller Wall” in 2019. Former essays editor of The Rumpus , she has written creative nonfiction, scholarly works, and writing craft articles for publications such as Newsweek , Oprah Magazine , Glamour , New York Magazine , Ploughshares , Poets & Writers Magazine , Writer’s Digest Magazine , Publishers Weekly , The Southampton Review, Cognoscenti, and War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities . She has also been a guest speaker on local and national television talk shows, podcasts, and Ms. Magazine’s Facebook “Live Q&A."
Zachary Stuart
Field: Public Speaking, Film/Video, Mulit-arts education, Social Justice
Zachary Stuart has worked in arts education and film production for 20 years in the Boston area. He was Lead-facilitator and curriculum officer for the innovative theater education program Urban Improv and the Director of the theater department at CAAP summer arts Experience in Brookline. He produced the documentary Savage Memory about the Early anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and is currently finishing post production on a new Feature documentary Die Before You Die , looking at female leadership in Islamic mysticism. With a focus on interdisciplinary collaboration, youth development and social justice, the public speaking component of his work relies heavily on embodied pedagogy and storytelling. He has also taught and developed curriculum in ceramics and photography with a fine art and community building orientation, mainly working with youth and urban communities.
Brian Sweeney
Field: American Literature
Research and Writing Interests: Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. literature; African American literature and print culture; periodical studies; cultures of professionalism; nineteenth-century music and literature
Brian Sweeney is a literary scholar, digital humanist, editor, and educator. He holds a PhD in English from Brown University. Before coming to Harvard, he taught at Brown, the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth (where he received the Chancellor's Innovation in Teaching Award), and The College of Saint Rose, where he was Professor of English and served as department chair. He was formerly Review Editor for American Periodicals and serves on the Advisory Board for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. He cofounded and codirects The Digital Colored American Magazine (coloredamerican.org), a digital humanities project focused on one of the most significant pre-Harlem Renaissance Black periodicals, and is coeditor of the Broadview Press edition of Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (2023). He was the 2021 recipient of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize.
Julia Tejblum
Fields: British Literature, Romanticism, poetry and poetics, narrative theory
Julia Tejblum holds a PhD in English Literature from Harvard, an MA from Oxford University, where she studied as a Clarendon Scholar, and a BA in English and Theater Arts from Brandeis University. Her current research focuses on the relationship between autobiography and form in Romantic and Victorian poetry. She has published criticism and reviews in Essays in Criticism, Romanticism, and The Wordsworth Circle. Other research interests include travel writing, narrative theory, literature and science, and literary influence.
Elliott Turley
Field: Theatre, Literature, Performance
Research and Writing Interests: Modern Tragicomedy, Theatre History and Theory, Performance Studies, Professional Rhetoric, Pedagogy
Elliott Turley is a scholar and teacher of literature, theatre, performance, and rhetoric. His peer reviewed articles can be found in Modern Drama, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Modern Language Quarterly, as well as the Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature. He has also published book and performance reviews in Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. His most recent work includes an article on Suzan-Lori Parks’s rewriting of American myth and a monograph-in-progress on modern tragicomedy.
Peter Vilbig
Fields: Creative writing, journalism, songwriting
Research and Writing Interests : fiction, songwriting
Peter Vilbig has covered war and refugees in Central America as a stringer for The Boston Globe , crime and politics as a staff writer for the Miami Herald , and the Congress and federal agencies as an investigative reporter for a Washington DC-based news service distributed to 200 papers nationally. His short fiction has appeared in Tin House , Shenandoah , and 3:AM Magazine, among many other publications in the US and Europe. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA in English teaching from Brooklyn College and has taught first-year writing at New York University and CUNY’s Baruch College. As a public high school teacher in New York City, he taught advanced placement English at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. Most recently he has been writing songs and has performed in small venues in New York and Providence, and at the Rhode Island Folk Festival.
Rob Willison
Fields: Social Science
Research and Writing Interests: Philosophy of Language, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, and Philosophy of Education
Rob Willison is a philosopher with broad interests, but his recent research has focused on philosophy of language and ethics—especially where those fields intersect. He has published work on the nature and ethics of irony, and has ongoing projects on the nature of concepts, and on the ways that a theory of meaning in general can be used to understand meaning’s particular kinds (for example, linguistic meaning and meaning in life). He also has long-standing interests in the philosophy of education, democratic theory, and the philosophy of social science. Before joining Expos, Rob served as a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard; as the Associate Director of the Parr Center for Ethics and Research; Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill; as the Director of Education Policy for a New York City Council Member; and as a high school Social Studies teacher in the New York City public schools. He has also worked as a consultant for UNICEF, co-leading a Social Norms Workshop addressing violence against women and children in Harare, Zimbabwe, and helping to develop “A Fieldworker’s Toolkit for Social Change.” Rob received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, and his AB in Social Studies from Harvard in 2003.
Mande Zecca
Fields: American literature & creative writing
Research and Writing Interests : American modernist and postwar literature; poetry and poetics; material culture and book history; radical political movements; literary subcultures
Mande Zecca holds a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA in English from Wesleyan University. Before coming to Harvard, she taught in the Johns Hopkins Program in Expository Writing for four years, two of them as a postdoctoral fellow. She writes poetry and scholarship about poetry, the latter in the form of a book project: Undersongs: Left Elegies and the Politics of Community . She’s also published writing (both scholarly and creative) in Modernism/modernity , Post45 , Jacket2 , Ploughshares , Colorado Review , CutBank , and elsewhere. Her chapbook of poems, Pace Arcadia , was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2017.
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Welcome, Class of 2028. Don’t get too comfortable.
“Writing, language, and thinking are continuous for me,” says Teju Cole, Harvard’s first Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
New faculty: Teju Cole
Jill Radsken
Harvard Staff Writer
‘Open City’ author will urge creative-writing students beyond genre limits
Novelist, critic, and essayist Teju Cole will teach creative writing courses in the spring as the first Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice. The boundary-crossing author is known for his debut novel “Open City,” among other works. (Early admirers of the 2011 book included Harvard professor and New Yorker critic James Wood.) Cole received the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2011, the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2015, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. A photographer who has had solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, he is also the photography critic for The New York Times Magazine.
GAZETTE: Welcome to Harvard. What form will your teaching take here?
COLE: Writing, language, and thinking are continuous for me, if not necessarily coterminous. In my published work, I try to break down the distinctions between them, and I do the same in my teaching. Writing is language-work, writing is thinking, and language-work is thinking. I’m going to teach two writing courses in the spring: “Writing Critically” and “Breaking Form.”
The critical-writing course asks: How do we respond to the arts in writing? There’s a fair bit of art history in my background, and photo criticism is my métier, but I’ve also done some poetry, film, and music criticism, and I want to bring those experiences into the classroom. What does it mean to approach a work of art and say something illuminating and intelligent about it? This is technically a nonfiction writing workshop, but does criticism have to be nonfiction?
John Berger tells the story about encountering an old man in a museum. The old man is looking at a painting, but the old man is Titian looking at his own painting. That’s critical writing, but that’s also fiction.
That dissolving of genres will be even more explicit in my other class. “Breaking Form” will be a writing course about experimental modes of writing. We will ask: How do we take the received forms and break them down? How do we look at other writers? How come not anything goes? If the writing has to work, what makes it work?
My friend Vijay Iyer [Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts] faces the same thing. He gets music students who have been given very rigid ideas of what jazz is and what the correct chord progressions should be. When you’re 18, or, really, at any age, you can mistake rigidity for rigor. As teachers, we trust that our students have the requisite rigor, but now we can help them be less rigid. That’s where it can start to get interesting!
“When you’re 18, or, really, at any age, you can mistake rigidity for rigor. As teachers, we trust that our students have the requisite rigor, but now we can help them be less rigid. That’s where it can start to get interesting!”
GAZETTE: You mentioned Vijay, with whom you have been collaborating since 2013. Can you speak more about your partnership?
COLE: I am grateful to be involved in various collaborations, but working with Vijay has been the most sustained and important. That the tide has brought us both here is astonishing. When we work together, what you have is two people who are trying to think of possibilities beyond their own field. Artists, facing an audience, want to call that audience to attention. How do we concentrate the focus of the people who sit before us in a concert or who buy our books? Vijay and I have independently been interested in doing that beyond our respective genres. To the person outside, he’s a jazz musician, but maybe he’s a performer of black American improvised music, or simply improvised music, and then it gets into this space of openness, where it is composed and free, partly predetermined, partly responsive to the present moment. And yet it all hangs together, it all has a necessity. That is a pretty close definition of what I try to do.
GAZETTE: Do you have ideas on other possible collaborations at Harvard?
COLE: A writer sits in his room and writes, but the idea of being a “professor of the practice” is exciting to me for what might happen. The University believes that a practitioner has a certain level of achievement to offer students, so I think part of the responsibility of the job is to keep finding ways to extend the work.
It’s very easy for me to imagine some collaboration with Sarah Lewis [assistant professor of history of art and architecture and of African and African American studies], for instance. I contributed to her Vision & Justice issue of Aperture. And Arts and Humanities Dean Robin Kelsey is an expert on photography.
I studied Northern Renaissance art and African art history, so it’s lovely that people like Joseph Koerner and Suzanne Blier are here. And of course there’s Visual and Environmental Studies, which might have well been my faculty home if I wasn’t in English. I look up to Chris Killip in VES the same way I look up to Helen Vendler in English. Lucien Castiang-Taylor in VES has been making amazing films that I’ve long admired.
The heart of the matter, though, is the 12 students around the table in each of these two classes. I will select students across University, potentially from Harvard Medical School, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard Divinity School, as well as undergraduates in the College. I’d like to have a nice mix. A professor ought to be a sympathetic intermediary between you and your potential audience: The audience is not necessarily sympathetic; it just wants good work. But your professor actually cares that this story means a lot to you, in addition to helping you make it good. I want to do for my students what my editors did for me: Show them how to maintain their writerly integrity without needlessly alienating their audience.
GAZETTE: Was writing “Open City” this kind of experience for you?
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COLE: I think it was. In 1998, I dropped out of medical school. For a decade after that I couldn’t even say that I dropped out. It felt like such a heavy thing. I remember someone using those words, and how wounded I felt. But I went straight into studying art history in London and then I came back to Columbia to continue studying. I loved art and writing about art and why it was important, but I also felt the constraints of working in a purely academic way. I went to Nigeria in 2005, and shortly after I did “Every Day Is for the Thief” and then “Open City.” Both were written while I was supposed to be writing my dissertation. Procrastination in the extreme! I had no idea anyone would publish these works. I knew how intensely I was writing it, how intensely I was making my notes as I walked around the city [New York] hours at a time.
You hear about people who hear God’s voice tell them to carve a church in the wilderness out of rock; that’s what writing “Open City” was for me: something spectral and strange, almost from beyond myself. And this voice, whatever it was, led me to a story narrated in the aftermath of 9/11 that was about the intensity of space and the historical dimensions of mourning in the space. An early reader said, “You clearly wrote the book you wanted to write,” and that was the warmest, sweetest thing I could hear.
GAZETTE: You will be the first Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of creative writing. Does that have meaning for you?
COLE: It’s great! Usually the bequest is not from someone you’ve heard of. Vidal was a superb essayist, wonderful novelist, and a politically spirited and engaged American. In those general terms, he is a model of public intellectual engagement. I’m not a writer who is hidden away from the world. My work is political. Part of the role of the writer, I believe, is to take dangerous positions on behalf of those whose voices are not so easily heard. Gore Vidal did that. He also took positions one cannot agree with, but I’m grateful for the bequest, because it opens up the possibility of counter-positions. I dare say what he would want would be for this money to support an enterprise that is both enamored of literature, of whatever is fine in literary practice, and also bold, liberated, and liberatory.
GAZETTE: So you will also be teaching boldness?
COLE: Yes. For most students who end up here, Harvard can feel like the big prize. It’s dazzling. But here’s the thing: You have not arrived at a destination, you have arrived at a beginning. There’s so much to do that’s not about the grades. We live in a society in which there’s not only so much to do but also so much to undo. Students have a task ahead — not just of achievement, which can be mechanical, but also of deconstruction, which is often a more delicate matter. I want every student here to look around and see what’s not right and say, “It’s not right” — and it’s on them to commit to the undoing. Rather than “I won at life,” it’s “There’s so much to do and undo.” We are all being charged with real work, and all this thinking/language-work/writing is simply the ferry that gets us there.
Interview was edited and condensed.
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Stanford Creative Writing Program
The Stanford Creative Writing Program, founded in 1946 by Wallace Stegner, has become one of the nation’s most distinguished creative writing institutions. After almost 80 years, the program continues to evolve while also respecting its original vision of recruiting and supporting talented writers, offering exceptional creative writing instruction and mentorship, and inspiring undergraduates to develop their own unique creative written expression.
In the 1940s, E. H. Jones generously created the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, now considered the most prestigious creative writing fellowship in the U.S. for emerging writers. Dr. Jones also made possible the Jones Lectureships, which are limited, fixed-year teaching appointments, allowing exceptional Stegner Fellows some time and support to prepare a manuscript for publication, hone their teaching skills, and transition to a longer-term teaching career elsewhere.
The original framework of term-limited appointments allowed for a consistent flow of selected Stegner Fellows into the Jones Lectureship. However, over time this framework of term-limited appointments was not followed.
In the past two years, the School of Humanities and Sciences leadership and the Creative Writing Academic Council faculty have been working to formulate necessary changes in the program and to identify additional resources to meet its growing needs. A Working Group of Creative Writing Academic Council faculty held listening sessions and discussions.
Now, after thoughtful deliberation, the Working Group has recommended restoring the original intent of the Jones Lectureships: one-year appointments with the possibility of renewal for a limited term, up to a total of five years. This change will again allow Stegner Fellows the opportunity to apply to be Jones Lecturers once they have completed their fellowships. In other words, the Jones Lectureships are not being eliminated; they are only being term limited, as was the original intent of the program, so that the Stegner Fellows have an opportunity to teach Creative Writing courses at Stanford. We plan for there to be as many lecturers in the Program in five years’ time as there are today, and we expect to offer more classes then than now.
The university, school, and numerous generous donors are committed to not only the excellence of the program but also its growth. This means increasing the number of Creative Writing classes to better meet high student demand as well as ensuring competitive compensation for both the lecturers and fellows. We will provide more updates in early fall quarter about the Creative Writing Program and how it will continue to be one of the preeminent programs in the nation.
We understand that these changes to the Jones Lectureships will be met with mixed reactions. However, we firmly believe that the changes advance the program’s pedagogical mission and provide promising writers with the resources to complete their books and obtain appointments at other colleges and universities.
Throughout the history of the program, the Jones Lecturers—both those who are here now and those who have been lecturers in the past—have helped make Stanford Creative Writing what it is today, and we are truly grateful to them for their significant contributions to the program’s mission.
Graduate Program in Creative Writing
Master of Arts in Creative Writing, Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
Master of Arts, Master of Fine Arts
Genre Fiction, Nature Writing, Poetry, Publishing, Screenwriting – an advanced degree in any of our five areas of creative writing provides you the opportunity to hone your craft, elevate your art, and inspire the world. Join our welcoming and inclusive community and become the writer you are meant to be. To learn more about our program directly from our faculty and students, check out our program video .
Program Overview
Pursue your dream of becoming a published author.
If you’re looking to get serious about your writing and you’re eager to join a thriving and diverse community of writers, then you’ll find your niche in Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Our five innovative areas of study—Genre Fiction, Nature Writing, Poetry, Publishing, and Screenwriting—offer cutting-edge courses, and our dedicated faculty of award-winning writers will ensure that you achieve your full potential as a writer.
Our low-residency model makes a graduate education accessible. During the academic year, students work closely with faculty and fellow students through videoconferencing and online courses. Each summer, all students take intensive courses that culminate in a one-week residency on Western’s beautiful campus in late July. These residencies are packed full of exciting courses, inspirational workshops and lively social events.
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Screenwriting student Tia Phillip giving a reading at the 2023 Open-Mic Night
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Kevin j. anderson, mfa.
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Byron Aspaas, MFA
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Nature Writing Faculty
Claire Boyles, M.A.
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Steve Coughlin, MFA
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Julie E. Czerneda
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Amy Fox, MFA
Screenwriting Faculty
CMarie Fuhrman, MFA
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Geoff Geib, MFA
Gwyneth gibby, m.a..
Publishing Faculty
Sarah Goettsch
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Carol D. Guerrero-Murphy, Ph.D.
Tyson hausdoerffer, ph.d..
Director, Graduate Program in Creative Writing
Mitali Jahagirdar, MFA
Tenea d. johnson, m.a., julie kane, ph.d., lindsay king-miller, mfa.
Thesis Mentor
Gary Lilley
Allyson longueira, m.a., js mayank, mfa.
Interim Director of Screenwriting
Cameron McGill, MFA
Candace nadon, ph.d..
Genre Fiction Faculty
Johanna Parkhurst, M.A.
Director, Genre Fiction Concentration
Laura Pritchett, Ph.D.
Director, Nature Writing Concentration
Laura Resau, M.A.
Nature Writing/Genre Fiction Faculty
Ligiah Villalobos Rojas, MFA
Liz sczudlo.
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Ana maria spagna, mfa, anna stileski, m.a..
Executive Assistant
Richard Wilber, Ed.D.
Genre Fiction Faculty, Graduate Thesis Coordinator
Maya Jewell Zeller, MFA
Nature Writing and Poetry Faculty
Laura Pritchett
Laura Pritchett, who directs the MFA with a concentration in Nature Writing, has two novels coming out in 2024, and they could not be more different.
Ligiah Villalobos Rojas
Melissa Dalton-Martinez
Lara Richardson
Take the first steps toward your academic and personal growth..
Fostering your intellectual development is the primary focus of every academic program at Western. Our professors and Office of Career Services will help you identify your strengths, hone your skills, define your goals, and prepare for a fulfilling and enriched life after graduation.
News & Research
Western’s MFA Director Laura Pritchett’s latest novel is born from a world on fire
Western Earns Accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission
Western Poetry Faculty Member Chosen for Prestigious Poetry Prize
Teaching into the Firetower
Western’s CMarie Fuhrman Releases New Anthology & Public Radio Podcast
Nature Writing and Western Press Books to Produce Inaugural Book
Renown Author Karen Auvinen to Join Western Faculty
Western Instructor Named to Top Writer’s Honor
Graduate Program Pushes Caps on Enrollment During Pandemic
Western Professor Named to Authors’ Hall of Fame
Additional resources, admission requirements & application.
Western’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing considers applications in four waves throughout the year: Early Admissions, from July 1 through November …
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Full-time enrollment in the MFA extends over 25 months, spanning four non-residency semesters and three Summer Residencies. Students may also attend half-time or take a leave of …
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The GPCW is deeply committed to raising funds to support our students. Each year we offer substantial direct-funding scholarships. The GPCW is currently …
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The highlight of our academic year is the Summer Residency, held each July on Western’s beautiful campus in Gunnison, Colorado.
How can a low-residency format create a sense of community among students and faculty?…
Publications
Publications in the Creative Writing Graduate Program Explore the publications below to discover the depth and breadth of Western’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing: Think Journal Christine …
GPCW Mission, Indigenous Commitment and DEIA+ Statements
The Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University seeks to create transformative learning experiences for our students, built from a strong foundation that honors our students’ unique voices and is supported within inclusive environments established both virtually and at yearly residency gatherings.
Learn More about the GPCW
Interested in learning more about the Graduate Program in Creative Writing? There’s no better way to get to know our program than through the voices of our faculty and students. Tune in to watch this informational video about everything you’ll look forward to as a student in our program.
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Creative Writing at Harvard University
Creative writing degrees available at harvard, harvard creative writing rankings, popularity of creative writing at harvard, harvard creative writing students, harvard creative writing master’s program.
Of the 17 creative writing students who graduated with a master's degree in 2020-2021 from Harvard, about 29% were men and 71% were women.
The following table and chart show the ethnic background for students who recently graduated from Harvard University with a master's in creative writing.
| Ethnic Background | Number of Students |
|---|---|
| Asian | 2 |
| Black or African American | 2 |
| Hispanic or Latino | 1 |
| White | 10 |
| Non-Resident Aliens | 0 |
| Other Races | 2 |
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‘It was like we were garbage’: Stanford to ‘cycle out’ creative writing lecturers
One creative writing lecturer requested anonymity due to fears of professional retaliation. Pseudonyms and gender neutral pronouns were used to protect sources’ identities and improve readability.
Many of Stanford’s creative writing lecturers will be phased out over the next two years, as the University restores the Jones Lectureship’s term limit as part of the restructuring of the Creative Writing Program.
The restructuring, executed under the recommendation of a working group formed after the lecturers secured pay raises last September, was announced in a Zoom meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 21 by Humanities and Sciences dean Debra Satz, Humanities and Arts senior associate dean Gabriella Safran and Creative Writing Program co-director Nicholas Jenkins. The working group was composed of creative writing faculty members but no Jones Lecturers.
The Jones Lectureship came with a four-year cap that only began to be enforced on fellows hired after 2019, but over the course of the years, some lecturers have stayed longer than the terms of the program. With the restoration of the original term-limited appointments, however, all current Jones Lecturers — including those hired prior to 2019 — will be let go within the next two years.
Some lecturers have already been affected; for instance, Rose Whitmore was dismissed in 2023 after winning that year’s Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize.
For Casey, a lecturer who requested the use of a pseudonym due to fear of professional retaliation, the Wednesday meeting felt cold and awkward.
“It was like we were garbage,” Casey said. “They didn’t even acknowledge how difficult this news would be, and when they did give us time to ask questions, the way they fielded the questions, particularly [Jenkins], it was just very cold and very dismissive.”
Safran disagreed with Casey’s characterization in a statement on behalf of the Creative Writing Program and the School of Humanities and Sciences. The Daily also reached out to the University for comment but has not obtained a response.
During the Wednesday meeting, the deans told the lecturers that they would be “cycled out.” They clarified that it meant the lecturers’ jobs would be “terminated,” Jones Lecturer Tom Kealey told The Daily. Some lecturers will be teaching for an additional year, while others will be teaching for two more years. Kealey called the situation a “future fire.”
“We were brought in to discuss the ‘restructuring’ of the overall program, and then we were all fired,” Kealey said. One lecturer even told him the meeting felt like the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones.
Five minutes after the meeting, an email from Christina Ablaza, the administrative director of the Creative Writing Program, informed the lecturers that they could sign up for one-on-one meetings to discuss their individual situations.
Lecturers to be affected by the decision were frustrated that they had no say in the phase-out. But Satz and Safran do not have voting power in the working group either — only the faculty members do. The faculty members made the decision “to fire all 23 of their junior colleagues” in what Kealey called a “secret meeting.”
“I got the impression that the deans themselves were confused as to why the professors had voted to fire them,” Kealey said.
Kealey believed that 10 out of all the creative writing faculty members on the working group only taught 13 undergraduate classes last year, while the same number of Jones Lecturers would have taught 50 classes. Lecturers also advise about 90% of students in the Creative Writing Program and 50% of students in Department of English, he estimated.
Many students expressed concerns that they will lose a strong community of creative writing peers and classes. They are also confused as to what the program will look like in the future.
Students are receiving information from each other, lecturers, a recently created Instagram page called “ripstanfordcw” (which stands for rest in peace, Stanford creative writing) and even from Fizz, an anonymous social media platform. The confusion comes a week before course enrollment is set to begin on Sept. 5.
Students have tried to voice their displeasure with the current decision. A petition , started by Kyle Wang ’22 M.A. ‘23, has received over 600 signatures from students and alumni. He began the petition after talking to some of his friends about the positive impact many of the Jones Lecturers have had on their lives. Other community membes tried to write emails to University administrators.
In an online announcement published on Wednesday, Aug. 28, the Creative Writing Program states that Stanford will increase “the number of creative writing classes to better meet high student demand as well as ensuring competitive compensation for both the lecturers and fellows.” According to the statement, more details will be released in the fall.
“I know they said that they were having meetings and they’re reworking [the program], but it’s not very transparent,” said English major Skya Theobald ’25.
Mia Grace Davis ’27, a prospective English major, wanted to take “English 190E: Novel Writing Intensive,” a class known for its popularity and limited enrollment, in the fall. Now she is not even sure if it will be offered in the future.
For Davis, the main appeal of Stanford had always been its Creative Writing Program, but “it’s kind of falling apart as we’re watching it,” she said.
To students who have taken numerous creative writing classes like Theobald, it doesn’t make sense why lecturers are being cycled out when the program wants to meet the growing demand for creative writing.
Prospective English major Annabelle Wang ’27 said what’s happening has even made her reconsider her course of study.
“It definitely makes the English major less desirable,” she said of the phase-out. “I think for students and the student experience, it’s going to be a really big loss. A lot of community is going to be lost.”
Theobald also expressed concerns the variety of creative writing classes will be reduced. A lot of them such as “English 190G: The Graphic Novel” and “English 190E: Novel Writing Intensive” are rarely offered at other universities, but incoming freshmen now may not have the same opportunities to explore those classes. For instance, specialized classes like “The Graphic Novel” may not be offered again if the lecturers who teach them are let go, Kealey said.
Students felt that the Jones Lecturers have shaped the way they view their own writing. Lydia Wang ’27 had often struggled to understand the value of her writing, but her lecturers were the ones to help her realize there is a place in the world for what she creates.
“That’s the type of impact that really changes people, and when people change, they can change the world as well,” she said. “So I really hope that Stanford learns to value the humanities, and especially creative writing, because we’re creating change, and we’re creating something for ourselves.”
Some lecturers remain hopeful that the restructuring, which is ongoing, will be reconsidered.
“I may be naive, but I still believe in Stanford. I think Stanford is much better than this,” Kealey said. “I think as light is shed on this, enough people are going to say, ‘This doesn’t make our university better. It makes our university much worse.’”
Judy N. Liu '26 is the Academics desk editor for News and staff writer at The Daily.
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Creative Writing
The Department of English offers creative writing instruction in multiple formats and offers several degrees and qualifications.
Undergraduate
At the undergraduate level, students who are enrolled in a B.A. program at UT Austin can pursue the Creative Writing Certificate .
We offer two MFA programs in creative writing:
- the New Writers Project
and
- the Michener Center for Writers.
Editorial Communications Research Assistant
About the Communications Research Assistants:
Are you interested in communications? The BKC communications team is seeking one or more creative, highly motivated candidates to work on a range of writing, project management, and digital media tasks that help tell the Berkman Klein story to the public and target audiences. You may be asked to help with any aspect of BKC’s communications activities, including writing and editing website and social media content, liaising with project teams, promoting events, and curating content for BKC’s newsletters, social media, and website. The right candidate is sharp, independent, and reliable; has knowledge of or an interest in the field of public interest technology, and can produce well-written, insightful content, with a quick turnaround.
About this position:
- Drafts and curates BKC’s newsletters.
- Drafts content for BKC’s social media channels, including X, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
- Helps maintain and update BKC websites.
- Ensures all deliverables adhere to brand and editorial standards, exhibiting extraordinary attention to detail and consistency.
- Project manages editorial standardization across the organization, such as updating a style guide and rewriting a wiki.
- Refines internal communications materials for how to work with the communications team.
- Works with stakeholders on and off campus, including staff, faculty, visiting scholars, fellows, students, and other subject matter experts.
Eligibility/Other information
- This position is currently hybrid. To be eligible for this position, you must be a currently enrolled undergraduate or graduate student at Harvard University. In-person attendance at certain events will be required.
- The time commitment would range between 7-14 hours per week.
- The ideal start date for this position is as soon as possible.
- Unless otherwise noted, the hourly wage for this position is $21 per hour.
- No other benefits are provided.
- We do not have the ability to provide authorization to work in the U.S.
Applications will be collected through this application form . The form will be closed when applications are no longer being accepted.
Required materials for all applicants include:
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- A brief cover letter describing your skills, interests, and what brought you to Berkman Klein Center.
- A portfolio of 3-5 examples of your graphic design work, including at least 3 samples produced for social media. If you have never done this before, just give it a try! We are all learning.
All materials will be collected as shareable links via the application form linked above.
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The work and well-being of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society are profoundly strengthened by the diversity of our network and our differences in background, culture, experience, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, ability, and more. We actively seek and welcome applications from people of color including members of Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and other communities; women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community; people with disabilities; and people at the intersections of these identities, from across the spectrum of disciplines and methods. For more information about accessibility at Harvard for applying to this or other positions, we encourage you to look for more resources online (note that many of these resources are only available to HLS students). If you are not an HLS student and have further questions regarding accessibility with respect to research assistant applications, please reach out to us at [email protected] .
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- Faculty Issues
- Shared Governance
‘Red Wedding’: Storied Stanford Creative Writing Program Laying Off Lecturers
The university says creative writing faculty recommended returning its Jones Lectureships to their “original intent” as short-term teaching appointments for talented writers. A lecturer of 20 years said he thinks there’s a “peasants and lords issue” in the program.
By Ryan Quinn
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Stanford University is laying off its current Jones Lecturers.
Some Stanford University lecturers are likening it to the “red wedding” in Game of Thrones —a massacre of characters by their supposed allies amid what had been billed as a celebratory feast.
Last Wednesday, a dean, a senior associate dean and a co-director of Stanford’s storied and popular creative writing program held a Zoom meeting with the program’s 23 Jones Lecturers, according to some of those lecturers, who were chosen from the ranks of those who have held the university’s prestigious Stegner Fellowship for writers.
The university leaders complimented the Jones Lecturers over Zoom. “They praised us to the moon,” Tom Kealey, a lecturer for two decades, told Inside Higher Ed . “Endlessly” praised was how Edward Porter, a lecturer of eight years, put it.
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Then, Kealey said, the leaders announced they would all be losing their jobs within the next two academic years. “The worst part is to be praised while you’re being fired,” Porter said. According to notes he took of the meeting, Nicholas Jenkins, the program’s co-director, said something to the effect of “you’re excellent, but others will be excellent in the future.”
There was an added sense of betrayal. The deans—Debra Satz, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Gabriella Safran, senior associate dean of humanities and arts—said this wasn’t their decision, according to Kealey. In Medium posts on the ordeal, he wrote that they said it came from “the senior professors of creative writing.”
“These are literally our teaching colleagues of the last five to 15 years,” Kealey wrote. “And they decided in a previous secret meeting to fire all 23 of their junior colleagues.” In another post, he wrote that “it was only the MALE professors who voted to fire us.” ( Inside Higher Ed reached out Tuesday to some of the male creative writing professors on Tuesday, but received no responses.)
In an unsigned announcement last Wednesday on the university’s website, Stanford said it is returning to the “original intent of the Jones Lectureships: one-year appointments with the possibility of renewal for a limited term.” That announcement said the recommendation came from faculty members on a “Working Group of Creative Writing Academic Council faculty,” but it didn’t name them.
Satz, Safran and Jenkins said in an emailed joint statement to Inside Higher Ed that "this change will again allow Stegner Fellows the opportunity to apply to be Jones Lecturers once they have completed their fellowships. Jones Lecturers will have one-year appointments with the possibility of renewal for up to four additional years."
While it’s no longer rare for non-tenure-track faculty members to be laid off by higher education institutions facing budget woes, Stanford is a wealthy institution and creative writing is, by its own admission, a popular program.
“We have a large number of fully enrolled classes, many with significant waitlists and some where the waitlists are longer than the enrollment roster,” Jenkins said in a February 2023 article on the university’s website. He also said, “We’re in a remarkable period of hiring during which we’re fortunate enough to be bringing to campus an extraordinarily talented array of significant artists and teachers.”
But the lecturers say they’re the ones teaching most of the creative writing classes for undergraduates, and that their years of experience improve teaching. Kealey said some lecturers teach five classes a year; others teach four. He wrote on Medium of the senior creative writing professors that “the 10 of them … taught 13 undergraduate classes last year (and 19 overall, less than two classes taught per professor).”
The leaders said during the Zoom meeting the decision wasn’t about money, according to Porter. “It’s maddening to have outstanding enrollment and be phased out anyway,” he said. While the university has said it wants to simply return the Jones Lectureships to the short stints they used to be, Kealey suggests the tenured professors in his department had other motives.
“I think there’s a peasants and lords issue here,” Kealey said.
A Long Time Coming?
In 1946, Wallace Stegner, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Angle of Repose , founded Stanford’s creative writing program. The Stegner Fellowships are named in his honor.
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E. H. Jones, who had an oil fortune, funded the fellowships and also established the connected Jones Lectureships, according to the university’s announcement from last week. It said these were meant to be “limited, fixed-year teaching appointments, allowing exceptional Stegner Fellows some time and support to prepare a manuscript for publication, hone their teaching skills and transition to a longer-term teaching career elsewhere.”
But “over time this framework of term-limited appointments was not followed,” the university said. It did not say when that change occurred. It might have had something to do with Eavan Boland.
Boland, an Irish poet, led the creative writing program for 20 years until her sudden death in 2020. “Eavan was just a fierce defender of the program,” Kealey said. He said her death “was a great loss to all of us.”
When Boland joined the program, Kealey said, it had maybe 20 or 25 classes. But Boland wanted every student who so desired to be able to take a creative writing class. Kealey said lecturers went to residence halls in early years to speak with students about the program. Over about 15 years, Kealey said, the program grew to offer about 120 classes.
Porter said Boland “developed a large cadre of about 20 to 25 lecturers.” Even though they were on one-year contracts, Porter said, they kept getting renewed. He said it’s true that Boland did move the lectureships away from their original intent—but that it was beneficial for students, teaching and the program.
“There are a lot of human skills to playing this game, and those don’t come in a year,” Porter said. “We have letters, testimonials from students about how much we’ve meant to them. We’re also very available to them—we talk to them outside of class, there’s a sense of continuing mentorship if they want it.”
Now, Porter said, “there is at least the appearance” of the university creating “artificial scarcity,” suggesting there’s no room for the new, younger Stegner Fellows writers to get a leg up by becoming Jones Lecturers “because these crusty old folks are hogging up all the real estate.” Safran, the senior associate dean, said, per Porter’s meeting notes, that “in some years few or no Stegners were able to advance.”
Kealey said, “There’s no shortage of space for new Stegner Fellows to be hired into the Jones Lectureships, but, I don’t know, the professors wanted to do a scorched earth with this, and that’s what they’ve done.”
The lecturers said they pushed for, and received, raises from the university in September 2023. “Exactly a year later we’re all fired,” so “connect the dots here,” Kealey said. “I think the lords didn’t like that—didn’t like the peasants speaking up.”
Porter talked about “balancing one set of values against the other.” He said the tenured or tenure-track “creative writing faculty doesn’t teach many classes and many of them are not involved—they don’t care about the undergraduates. It’s not their job to care; it’s their job to write books, be famous and raise money, and that’s very necessary.”
And part of the purpose of the Jones Lectureship program is to give new writers a step up. But Porter worries about the other side of the equation being lost. “It’s our job to care about the undergrads,” he said.
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Creative Writing | Department of English
Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders in many disciplines who make a difference globally. ... Students enrolled in the Master of Liberal Arts program in Creative Writing & Literature will develop skills in creative writing and literary analysis through literature courses and ...
Through the master's degree in creative writing and literature, you'll hone your skills as a storyteller — crafting original scripts, novels, stories, and works of creative nonfiction. In small, workshop-style classes, you'll master key elements of narrative craft, including characterization, story and plot structure, point of view ...
Creative Writing. The English Department is proud to be a home for creative writing at Harvard. The vital presence of creative writing in the department is reflected by our many distinguished authors who offer small, intensive workshops each term in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting, and television writing.
The Master of Liberal Arts, Creative Writing and Literature degree field is offered online with 1 course on campus. A one-week option is available for the on-campus requirement. ... Nearly all courses can be taken online, but the degree requires an in-person experience at Harvard University where you enroll in our summer Writers' Residency.
Creative Writing Workshops. English CSJM. Who Do You Think You Are: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop. Instructor: Saeed Jones. Thursday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD. Enrollment: Limited to 12 students. People don't just happen. In this workshop-based class, students will explore the capacity of memoir and cultural criticism to illuminate ...
Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing. Education: B.A. 1996 Kalamazoo College M.A. 2000 SOAS, University of London M. Phil. 2006 Columbia University ... Ph.D., Harvard University (1971) Interests: American Novel... Read more about Philip Fisher. Office: Barker 153. [email protected]. p: 617-496-4961.
Through a series of imaginative writing prompts, generative exercises, and longer form projects, our semester culminated in a finished one act play with a plot entirely of our own choosing. The playwriting workshop is easily one of my favorite classes I've ever taken at Harvard. Having a creative outlet in one of my classes felt fulfilling ...
Welcome from the Director of Graduate Studies. Our graduate students come from across the globe, with a huge range of life experiences, tastes, and talents. Graduate education in the Harvard English Department is about helping each of our unique students become the scholar, teacher, writer, reader, mentor, and citizen they want to be.
About the Creative Writing Thread. The Creative Writing thread incorporates Poetry, Print Pressing (word art), Creative Writing, Screen and Script Writing, Fiction Writing, Comedic Improv, and much more. All students will be able to participate in the Creative Writing Masterclass, Keynote Speaker, and Information Session about curricular and ...
Creative Writing Tips from Harvard's Faculty. Claire Messud teaches fiction writing at Harvard. Harvard's English faculty hosts a powerhouse of acclaimed creative writers. As lecturers and ...
Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking. Gain critical communication skills in writing and public speaking with this introduction to American political rhetoric. Browse the latest Writing courses from Harvard University.
The HESCWLS seeks to provide a home base for Harvard Extension students in the ALM Creative Writing and Literature degree program, welcoming all disciplines engaging in the creative literary process. Our society offerings include live and virtual events fueling professional development in the form of writing workshops, critique circles, skill ...
About Us. The Harvard Undergraduate Creative Writing Collective is concerned with filling the gap in the creative writing community on Harvard's campus. Through mentorship, drop-in hours, networking events, book clubs, workshop events, speaker series, and service opportunities, we ultimately seek to create a radically inclusive, tight-knit ...
The Creative Writing and Literature program offers two capstone sequences: fiction (section 1) and fiction or nonfiction (section 2). CREA E-599 (Sections 1 and 3): Capstone: Developing the Manuscript: Fiction provides you with an opportunity to complete an additional two stories or chapters of your manuscript for a total of 50-60 pages of ...
English. In the Department of English, students think about, study and write about the artful ways in which people can and do use words, from thousand-year-old epics about fighting monsters to the intimate poems and the public addresses of our own time. The department is also the academic home at Harvard for creative writers and creative writing.
People - Harvard College Writing Program
Novelist, critic, and essayist Teju Cole will teach creative writing courses in the spring as the first Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice. The boundary-crossing author is known for his debut novel "Open City," among other works. (Early admirers of the 2011 book included Harvard professor and New Yorker critic James Wood.) Cole received the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2011, the Windham ...
Academic Writing | Jeffrey R. Wilson
Harvard Master's Student Diversity for Creative Writing. 12 Master's Degrees Awarded. 50.0% Women. 16.7% Racial-Ethnic Minorities*. In the 2019-2020 academic year, 12 students received their master's degree in creative writing. The gender and racial-ethnic breakdown of those individuals is shown below.
Through the Harvard University master's degree in the field of Creative Writing and Literature you will: Master key elements of narrative craft, including characterization, story and plot structure, point of view, dialogue, and description. Develop skills across multiple genres, including fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic writing.
The Stanford Creative Writing Program, founded in 1946 by Wallace Stegner, has become one of the nation's most distinguished creative writing institutions. After almost 80 years, the program continues to evolve while also respecting its original vision of recruiting and supporting talented writers, offering exceptional creative writing instruction and mentorship, and inspiring undergraduates ...
Best Creative Writing Courses Online with Certificates [2024]
The Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University seeks to create transformative learning experiences for our students, built from a strong foundation that honors our students' unique voices and is supported within inclusive environments established both virtually and at yearly residency gatherings.
Harvard Creative Writing Rankings. Harvard is in the top 10% of the country for creative writing. More specifically it was ranked #12 out of 215 schools by College Factual. Popularity of Creative Writing at Harvard. In 2021, 17 students received their master's degree in creative writing from Harvard. This makes it the #52 most popular school ...
One creative writing lecturer requested anonymity due to fears of professional retaliation. Pseudonyms and gender neutral pronouns were used to protect sources' identities and improve readability.
The Department of English offers creative writing instruction in multiple formats and offers several degrees and qualifications. Undergraduate. At the undergraduate level, students who are enrolled in a B.A. program at UT Austin can pursue the Creative Writing Certificate. Graduate. We offer two MFA programs in creative writing: the New Writers ...
The BKC communications team is seeking one or more creative, highly motivated candidates to work on a range of writing, project management, ... Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a University-wide research center and one of the largest and most influential conveners and accelerators of scholars, technologists ...
University Schedule Of Classe. Web Registration System. Creative Writing Courses . 351:211 Introduction to Creative Writing (Fall 2024) ... Practice in creative writing in various forms (fiction, poetry, drama, essay); critical analysis of students' manuscripts in class and/or individual conferences. Reading other student work, as well as the ...
The university says creative writing faculty recommended returning its Jones Lectureships to their "original intent" as short-term teaching appointments for talented writers. A lecturer of 20 years said he thinks there's a "peasants and lords issue" in the program. Some Stanford University lecturers are likening it to the "red wedding" in Game of Thrones—a massacre of ...