UH English Majors

09/27/2026

Swag alert! New bookmarks are available in the front office. 👀📚

09/27/2026

Karin Keller, Associate Development Officer for Planned Giving at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, got her start with a UH English BA in 2021. Karin describes how the writing and research skills she built in her English classes are now crucial to her work in development. "As a student firmly steeped in humanities courses,” she recollects, “I soon learned that it was not enough to simply dive into the text itself. I needed to examine the work’s intent and how it was received by the audience as well as the broader context within which it was created . . . This general line of thought has served as the foundation for how I approach my current work in development at the Met. Now, I spend much of my time writing personalized letters or crafting large-scale communication materials. To be effective in my role, it is crucial that I not only ask what I want to say, but also how it will be interpreted by others and if there is anything that could impact my intended message.”

“My time studying English at UH taught me to write thoughtfully and concisely, giving careful consideration to what I wanted to convey and how to most successfully achieve that goal. While skills like these may seem abstract in the classroom, I have continued to see the greatest value in them throughout my career."

09/27/2026

Former UH English major and current Emory University Associate Professor Meina Yates-Richard () recently published her first scholarly book, Sonorous Passages: Black Maternal Soundings and the Liberatory Imagination (Duke University Press, 2026). The book examines how the sounds of Black maternal figures function as mediators of liberatory thought within Black Atlantic literary and cultural production. By reading a range of works, from the essays of Frederick Douglass to modern-day sonic art, Yates-Richard traces how Black maternal figures have been conceptually elided from the Black political imagination, even as the soundings of Black mothers provide generative sites for political thought.
 
“This work of course grows out of my graduate study, though at the time I was most interested in exploring sound as a mode of traumatic testimony to enslaved experience. As I more keenly reaudited my primary materials, however, I grew more and more interested in how Black maternal figures’ soundings articulated freedom imaginings – even as those figures were often taken as emblems of unfreedom. My dissertation adviser, Dr. Nicole Waligora-Davis, had long counseled me that this was really a project concerned with freedom, but I could not quite see that in-process.”
 
Reflecting on her years at UH, Yates-Richard notes that “I am a first-gen college graduate, and I think that this is a population that UH in general and English in particular serves well. I felt nurtured and encouraged to dream during my time there.”
 
Another anchoring figure in her project was her grandmother, Jewel Faye. “When I was growing up, she frequently said ‘I heard you twice the first time’ – a delightful turn of phrase that always presented an enigma to me. Fast-forward many years, and after much study and practice of close reading and listening to literature, I developed the critical methodology of ‘double listening.’ This method aims to capture strategies of listening on dual (or multiple) registers, re-auditing and reinterpretation, listening for echoes, and attuning to vibration in order to unearth previously unheard resonances of Black liberation discourse.”

09/27/2026

Last week the English Department, MMI, and Creative Writing were pleased to welcome New York-based director and producer Jared Ian Goldman. Goldman’s credits include the Peacock spy series Ponies; the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Russian Doll; Jeff Nichols’s Oscar-nominated drama, Loving; and the Sundance breakout Ingrid Goes West, for which he received an Independent Spirit Award.

To a packed CWP Reading Room, Goldman discussed the creative and professional skills he derived from his college English major.

“I didn’t understand when I was in college that every time somebody made me closely read a paragraph, I was developing a professional skill.

“How to read closely. How to interpret. How to recognize POV. How to understand what somebody means rather than simply what they say. How to communicate an idea. How to recognize when something doesn’t ring true. How to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet.”

Goldman described the importance of storytelling to business.

“If you cannot describe the world you want, it becomes much harder to build it. If you’re starting an organization, other people have to understand what you’re trying to build. If you’re advocating for social change, you have to make a different version of reality imaginable. If you’re interviewing for a job, you’re asking somebody to imagine you doing work you don’t currently do for them. You have to describe the world you see clearly enough that somebody else says: I see it too.”

Goldman also encouraged students nervous about entering the workplace at a time of rapid change due to AI. “You’re entering the world at a moment when it may feel especially difficult to see the road ahead. Creative industries are changing. The way people consume media is changing. AI is changing everything. But when I look at what has actually allowed me to navigate all of the changes in my own career, I keep coming back to skills I started developing as an English major.

“And that’s why I think a degree in the humanities matters. The skills you’ve learned are not tied to one particular job or one particular industry. They’re skills you carry as the jobs, tools, and industries around you change."

09/27/2026

09/12/2026

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by our Welcome Back Social for books, ice cream, and hangs. It’s good to be back in the major for humans. 🍦🍁📚

09/12/2026

WCL major Cayla Fast tells us about her favorite classics. What are yours? Explain to us in a video.

09/09/2026

09/08/2026

Professor Haylee Harrell tells us about the first book she fell in love with and her favorite book to teach 📖✨

07/09/2026

Still looking for an English class for the fall? Consider these cool options.