The OWU English Department Blog
I just moved to Chicago, and I’m already loving it! The theatre scene out here is much different than what I was used to in New York– instead of having a centralized “theatre district,” Chicago seems to have theatres just about everywhere I turn. Right now, I’m in rehearsals for As You Like It with Odds Bodkins, a new Shakespeare troupe.…
Recommended by Catharine Boyle
I recently read The Kite Runner. People have been recommending it to me since I was in high school so I finally read it and found it has become one of my favorite books. It tells the story of two very close friends named Amir and Hassan.…
Favorite Authors, Genres, Periods, Interests?
Shakespeare, the English Romantics, ee cummings, absurdism.
What do you like most about being an English major?
Getting to have classes under a brilliant faculty and explore new corners of human expression.
What has been your most exciting or transformative experience as a major?
Not only learning to write like Shakespeare, but putting it into practice to develop a full length original Shakespearean tragedy…
I ended up at a marketing firm in Columbus as a business development analyst, which is in line with my interests. I’m not happy unless I’m writing reports! Being an English major (particularly an English major from Ohio Wesleyan) meant I had to have diverse interests, and experience in a number of different fields.…
Recommended by Professor Allison
In his dystopian novel The Circle (2013), Dave Eggers casts a skeptical eye on Silicon Valley messianism. The breathless self-importance, the self-satisfied (and superficial) cosmopolitanism, the naïve faith in a technological fix for humankind’s every ill—Eggers knows his target, and his criticisms are as thought-provoking as they are funny.…
Recommended by Professor Carpenter
What we know for the first third of this wonderful novel is that the narrator’s life has been scarred by a cataclysmic event that destroyed her family and left her struggling to relate to people and react appropriately to everyday occurrences around her. I won’t spoil the surprise, but the novel’s slow revelation of what has gone wrong in this young woman’s life is beautifully crafted and compelling.…
Recommended by Professor Ford
Wild Nights by Joyce Carol Oates is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read – a collection of stories about the last days of certain luminaries from the American literary canon (Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway). The stories are all in some way fantastic, dark and harrowing.…
Recommended by Professor Long
During the semester I don’t have the long-term memory for novels, so I tend to read nonfiction for pleasure, and my greatest non-literary pleasure is music. This book by Jack Hamilton examines the period of popular music I am listening to the most right now (1960s rock, pop, and soul), with an emphasis on collaboration and musical inspiration between black and white artists.…
I’m now an editor at America’s Test Kitchen. It’s a dream come true for a writer who likes to cook. Although I spend about half of my time in the kitchen, no day goes by that I am not grateful for my time in the English department. ATK is very collegial and each piece of writing goes through a rigorous editing process.…
Recommended by Professor Hipsky
This sci-fi classic appeals to the pimply-faced sixteen-year-old nerd in me. Set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, it chronicles the existential angst of organic androids who are treated as chattel, and rise up against their makers. Both an action-packed detective story and a philosophical exploration of what it means to be human, the novel was adapted into the cult film Blade Runner, together with which it stands as “exhibit A” in the gallery of postmodernity.…
