Department of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago

09/24/2026

Note the updated date and location!
Join the English Department for our annual Undergraduate Open House Party Tuesday, October 6th from 4-6pm on the 4th floor of Walker Museum. Mix and mingle with students and faculty, enjoy ice cream, peruse our free books, win prizes, and learn more about the goings on in the English department. We look forward to seeing you there to kick off another great year of conversation, curiosity and community!

09/23/2026

Join the English Department for our annual Undergraduate Open House Party Tuesday, October 6th from 4-6pm in Rosenwald Hall room 405. Mix and mingle with students and faculty, enjoy ice cream, peruse our free books, win prizes, and learn more about the goings on in the English department. We look forward to seeing you there to kick off another great year of conversation, curiosity and community!

05/27/2026

Congratulations to our graduating fourth years and thesis writers!! It was such a blast to hear about all of your brilliant writing at last night’s celebration! Thank you to all who came out for the event.

03/26/2026

Congratulations to on receiving the 2026 Dean’s Award for Graduate Student Teaching Excellence at !

Among other teaching that she has done in the Department of English , Kashaf taught a course titled “Medieval Desire” in Winter 2025, in which (quoting from her teaching statement),

“students explore the psychic and social contours of what medieval subjects wanted and how these desires intersected with gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. I teach students to analyze Middle English lyrics, mystical manuals, dream-visions, and fictional tales alongside theories of desire from psychoanalysis and affect theory. For instance, we read the 14th-century allegory Pearl alongside Lauren Berlant’s Desire/Love, discovering that both medieval religious imaginaries and modern critical theory relish in the idea that desire is an act of misrecognizing the thing one wants—a jolting lesson in the transhistorical potency of estrangement.”

10/22/2025

Students in the new Research Methods class got to visit yesterday to look at some cool things from the archives, including Brooks’s “We real cool” and the accompanying correspondence.

10/15/2025

may have , but we’ve got Dale the Snail. Drop by Lex’s office to say hi and meet our department’s newest member.

01/24/2025

01/20/2025

From “Burial Practice” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53714/burial-practice