Welcome...
As one of the most popular majors in the college, the English Department offers a wide range of courses in literature and writing. Faculty participate in many of the college’s interdisciplinary programs, including Development of Western Civilization, American Studies, the Feinstein Institute for Public Service, the Liberal Arts Honors Program, and Women’s Studies. Each semester, the department sponsors formal talks, literary readings, and informal gatherings.
Our graduates flourish in a wide variety of fields, including (but not limited to) education, journalism, law, publishing, politics, business, public relations, advertising, and medicine. Please explore our website and speak with faculty to learn more about us.
Announcements...
Assistant professor Elizabeth Bridgham recently published Spaces of the Sacred and Profane: Dickens, Trollope, and the Victorian Cathedral Town (Routledge, 2007). This study examines the unique cultural space of Victorian cathedral towns as they appear in the literary work of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, arguing that Dickens and Trollope use the cathedral town as an ideal locus from which to critique Victorian religious attitudes, aesthetic anxieties, business practices, and even immigration. By distancing these social issues from London, the authors defamiliarize them, raising what might have been considered strictly urban problems to the level of national crises. In this sense, their cathedral towns are not idealized city spaces that invite escape from the world; rather, they reflect the Victorian societies of which they are a part. Furthermore, by situating contemporary debates in cathedral towns, Dickens and Trollope complicate the distinction between urban and rural space often drawn by contemporary critics and Victorian fiction writers alike.
New faculty...
Robert Stretter specializes in medieval English literature, particularly the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. His scholarly interests include Middle English romance, the literary history of male friendship, the legacy of the Middle Ages in the Renaissance and beyond, Shakespeare, the development of western drama, and issues of gender, sexuality, and ethics in literature. Since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, Dr. Stretter has taught at Pacific Union College (CA), Trinity College (CT), and Yeshiva College (NY). He has published articles on Chaucer, John Lydgate, and early English Renaissance drama in The Chaucer Review, Medievalia et Humanistica, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Dr. Stretter is currently at work on a book entitled Other Selves: Theorizing Friendship from Chaucer to Shakespeare, which examines idealized male friendship and sworn brotherhood in medieval and Renaissance literature.
E.C. Osondu comes to Providence College from the University of Maryland where he was a lecturer in the English and Creative Writing department. A native of Nigeria, he received his M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Syracuse in 2007, after emigrating to the US from Lagos, Nigeria, where he worked for several years in advertising. In 2007 E. C. was one of five finalists for the prestigious Caine Prize in African Writing, for his story "Jimmy Carter's Eyes." His short story, "A Letter From Home," published in Agni (Boston University's literary journal), was recognized as one of the best Internet Stories of 2006, and his story "Voice of America," published in the 2008 Fiction Issue of Vice Magazine, has already been translated into Italian, French and German. E. C. co-edited For Ken, For Nigeria (1996), a collection of poems in memory of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the slain Nigerian writer and political activist. His story on the genocide in Darfur is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, and this summer Fiction Magazine will publish his story about an American oil company executive kidnapped in Nigeria's Niger Delta. He is currently working on a novel about genocide.