Our Graduates
Angela Markle
My English studies at Wash U were totally invigorating, providing me with a wealth of knowledge as well as a set of widely applicable skills. The same critical analytic and writing faculties that served me well as an undergraduate English major have been invaluable in meeting the rigorous demands of law school. Literary studies gave me a fresh, dynamic perspective that has allowed me to approach the law with a creative as well as a deeply analytical mind.
Yoni Cohen
"Argumentation challenged me to analyze, organize, and focus my writing. The course strengthened my logical reasoning, critical thinking, and writing skills, well preparing me to work as a congressional press secretary and a college basketball reporter. Professor Brockmann taught me how to effectively structure arguments and persuasively advocate ideas. I couldn't recommend Argumentation or Professor Brockmann more strongly."
Currently a student at Yale Law School. Formerly a press secretary for Congressman Pete Stark and a college basketball reporter for Fox Sports.
Cheveda Fergerson
Cheveda J. Fergerson is originally from Charleston, South Carolina. Always a fan of traveling she first ventured west to study in English and African American Studies with a Minor in Drama at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. After graduation, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for two years working as a stage manager in various theatre companies including the Tony Award-winning nonprofit Berkeley Repertory Theatre. In January of 2004, she moved abroad to teach English as a Foreign Languagein Fukuroi city, Japan. Later in July of 2005, she returned to SouthCarolina for four years before joining the 106th Specialist Orientation class as a Foreign Service Office Management Specialist (OMS). Shearrived in Shanghai, China as the Regional Security Office OMS in September of 2009. At the US Consulate General Shanghai, she is the treasurer for the American Employee Association as well as the consulate’s Federal Women’s Program Coordinator. She has greatly enjoyed her time in Shanghai and eagerly awaits her next posting in US Embassy Warsaw, Poland.
Jenny Kronovet
Jenny's (Poetry '01) first collection of poems, Awayward, was published in March, 2009, by BOA Editions, LTD in the A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America Series. The Writing Program at Washington University will be proud to have Jenny join us as Writer in Residence beginning in the fall of 2010.
Kronovet is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Circumference: Poetry in Translation. Her poems have appeared in Crowd, Pleiades and Ploughshares, amongst others.
Anna Lee
'Law schools love it when you major in English,' is one utilitarian version of the cliché; 'the intellectual rewards of studying English literature extend beyond the knowledge of various plot summaries,' sounds slightly more high-minded. Still, you might not realize the multidimensional nature of an education in English literature until you actually end up in law school or, as in my case, researching amateur photography within an Art History doctoral program. I came to this unexpected place, in part, because the instructors in this department taught me how to feel empowered by literary theory, Modernist fiction and poetry, and early American thought. Some were strict pedagogues, and others taught by modeling exuberance. These different methods, however, seemed to revolve around the shared desire to shape rather than mold, another cliché that was very true to my experience: Kellie Wells and Marina Mackay taught me to take myself seriously as a writer, Steven Meyer taught me to take myself seriously as a thinker, and Robert Milder taught me that the text should be taken most seriously of all. By the end, I'd figured out that as long as I was rigorous, I could allow myself to study what I loved and be guided my intuitions - a lesson that extends beyond the knowledge of various plot summaries but feels as non cliché as possible.
Greg Londe
As I write this I’ve just returned from a month of dissertation research in the National Library of Ireland. One particularly happy moment of archival serendipity came as I was panning for gold in the still unsorted papers of the poet John Montague. Inside a box of his letters was a small correspondence with Dillon Johnston, who had acted as my primary advisor on my undergraduate thesis; Prof. Johnston, with all the gracious encouragement and intellectual rigor that he’d shown me in my senior year, writes of Irish poetry and politics, of American publishing, and he promises to show his guest some “real mountain music” once Montague arrives in North Carolina. Dillon, and Prof. Guinn Batten, introduced me to Montague’s poetry; and this moment of rediscovering their intense and personal connection to the literature is only the most recent and most sublime of the many ways that my undergraduate experience at Wash. U. has recurred in, has formed the archive of, my work as a graduate student at Princeton University.
The English major prepared me for work in a competitive graduate program through an astonishingly diverse course catalog, with each class led by a professor who would urge me to engage the material from a variety of perspectives and with a consistent emphasis on personally directed research. I look back at my mad transcript and wonder that I didn’t take more courses in philosophy or history or other adjacent humanities, but then I vividly remember the anguished hours trying to decide between all the classes on offer in English alone: classes on T.S. Eliot, postmodernism, gothic literature, autobiography, modern British fiction, the year 1957, Irish verse. Between these courses and the opportunity, through one of the department’s exchange programs, to study English literature in Oxford for a full year, I arrived at graduate school with a full survey of the English canon and the knowledge of that canon’s contingency and limitations.
Teachers like Nancy Pope and Steven Meyer always gave enthusiastic but critically rigorous comments that shaped me as a writer of analytic prose. And really, what one needs to enter into graduate study is simply this: a facility for writing, coupled with a readiness to be thorough with the literature one loves and open to the literature one doesn’t yet know. In those respects, my dissertation work at Princeton on mid-20th-century Anglophone long poems entails a difference in the scale of engagement but not a difference of approach. Wash. U. English professors, more than at other undergraduate institutions that I’ve seen, cultivate an interest in literary theory and criticism by supplementing and counterpointing the primary readings for a course. The result is a relationship to theory wholly appropriate to the current methodological atmosphere of American graduate programs: pragmatic and curious, free of dogmatism or the unnecessary policing of boundaries.
As an undergraduate, one of my classes went kayaking with Wayne Fields in Montana, as a sort of ultimate gloss on Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar.” Dan Shea conferred with me for countless hours, advising the establishment of a student journal of literary criticism (probably no longer running – but consider that an invitation to join the major and found your own). Jami Ake’s Shakespearean revels got me all confused, just as I was settling into my 20th century focus, about whether I should really just plunge in to Renaissance drama. Taken together, such living experiences of literature readied me for what I am now trying to make a life of reading and teaching.
J. Shelley
When I declared English as my major, I was a junior who had completed only one English course at Washington University and hadn't fulfilled any of the prerequisite units. In my senior year, I was taking English 215: Introduction to Literary Study, a class that really should have been completed two or three years before. Despite my tardiness, I was always encouraged and downright impressed with how much the department kept track of me. Professors from previous semesters were always saying hi to me in the halls of Duncker and asking me what I was taking, a question that I quickly learned was not a passing formality. In a segment on W.B. Yeats in Introduction to Literary Study, I distinctly remember when Professor Batten, knowing and remembering that I had taken Professor Johnston's class on James Joyce the semester before, asked me how Yeat's winding gyres related to Joyce's use of parallax in Ulysses. The question had me momentarily dumbfounded--in many ways it still does--but the moment remains a shining example of the faculty's attention to each of its majors. Professors would regularly make efforts to critically engage student's particular literary knowledge beyond the confines of the class at hand. It was moments like these that made my time as an English major feel like, if not truly be, a sustained and extended intellectual discourse rather than a disparate set of classes that needed to be checked off.
Even when I attempted to approach a particular course as a mere requirement, it was the faculty's canny ability to enhance my interest that made my undergraduate experience so remarkable and ultimately put me down the path towards graduate study in English literature. Indeed, the most influential class of my undergraduate career was the one I resisted the most. When I signed up for Professor Loewenstein's Spenser Lab, it was out of necessity: I needed another pre-1700 century course to fulfill the major's requirements and, admittedly, wanted nothing to do with a pre-1800 poet. I thought that Spenser was Irish, which is sort of understandable, and from the 18th century, which doesn't make any sense at all. Adding to my gross confusion about the author himself was the fact that the English class had a curious "lab" section. The mildly unconventional course title did reflect a somewhat unconventional course structure: rather than a traditional long paper, the lab portion of the class prepared digital transcriptions of Spenser's texts for the generation of a joint digital and three volume print edition of the complete works of Edmund Spenser with Oxford University Press. We were marking textual variants in the early 16th century print editions of Spenser's epic. We were drafting introductions and preparing commentary. As undergraduates, we were doing serious editorial work on a professor's own scholarly project.
The following semester, I continued working on the Spenser Archive with Professor Loewenstein as an independent study and would later work on the archive for an additional year as the Post-Baccalaureate Fellow in Digital Humanities in the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University. I particularly liked how my involvement with the the project allowed me to tell friends and relatives that I was "working on a book," but moreover, it continued to give me unmatched experience and invaluable insight on the multiple aspects of a long term scholarly project. I fast became familiar with the Spenser holdings in Special Collections at Olin Library and was invited to lead presentations on the physical bibliography and book making of the hand press period. Professor Loewenstein generously gave me the opportunity to outline work plans for the Spenser Archive as part of his freshman FOCUS class, in effect, allowing me to try my hand at teaching. It was this diversity of scholarly and academic experience stemming from the major--the chance to contribute to a long term scholarly project, exposure to digital humanities, a familiarity with early print culture and libraries' special collections, the opportunity to teach--that I credit with not only exposing me to and preparing me for the challenges of graduate school but confirming that I wanted to take them on.
Even more simply, the English department's comprehensive support and attention that I valued so much as an undergraduate extended well past graduation. Professor Rosenfeld diligently reviewed my writing sample for my graduate school applications. Professor Grausam pretty much told me how to study for the GRE. I was allowed to sit in on Professor Batten's Lacan class which I'm certain was responsible for my answering the psychoanalysis question on the GRE correctly.
Whenever people ask me "how is grad school?" I always tell them that it's "a blast," an assessment that I immediately feel like I should rescind since I don't think I should be having this good of a time. But it's a honest appraisal that I have the Washington University English Department and major to thank in large part for. My experience as an English major at Washington University was genuinely inspiring: it made me want to continue the intellectual discourse that it started. I can attest to the fact that the department truly prepares its majors for continued graduate work, and this preparedness is certainly part of what has made my time at Berkeley a success. But it is the desire for an ongoing literary discussion that has made my graduate school experience so rewarding. I look always forward to going to the Berkeley campus because I get to hear what my professors and fellow students have to say. Likewise, I look forward to being able to turn a student's "required" course into a primary interest just as the English major did for me. I can't wait to teach a class where I get to ask someone what the winding gyres have to do with parallax.
Alice Chuang
Majoring in English at Wash. U. was one of the most enriching intellectual experiences during my undergraduate studies. The enthusiasm and warmth of the faculty there sparked my passion for reading and writing about literary texts. I’ll never forget discussions on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in Prof. Miriam Bailin’s seminar, Othello in Dean Jami Ake’s class on Shakespeare, and Mrs. Dalloway in Prof. Marina MacKay’s course on literary criticism. These classes — and many others
— taught me close reading skills that allowed me to see connections between language and social contexts. Their emphasis on writing gave me a solid foundation for those 20-paged seminar papers I’ve had to write in graduate school. Moreover, the variety of courses offered (from the Bible as literature to twentieth-century fiction) both gave me a broad understanding of literary texts through history and allowed me to focus in depth on modernism during my last year at Wash. U.
The senior honors program, in particular, prepared me well for my graduate studies in English at Vanderbilt University. I remember learning how to use library databases, assess articles in academic journals, and frame arguments in conversation with existing debates. Because I took the honors thesis track, my academic advisor and thesis director, Prof. MacKay, spent hours giving me much appreciated feedback on my work. Her comments helped me write better and shaped my intertextual, historical approach to literary studies. The oral examination at the end of the thesis process gave me a taste of the exams and dissertation defense I faced in graduate school. My committee, Professor MacKay, Professor Bailin, and Professor Wolfram Schmidgen, also provided me with invaluable advice during the process of applying for graduate school. The examples that my professors at Wash. U. set for academic rigor and great teaching inspired me to become a researcher and teacher.