Welcome
The LSU English Department has an illustrious history, once boasting having Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren, author of All the King’s Men, and critic Cleanth Brooks, a founder of the New Criticism, on its faculty. Today we continue that tradition of creative writing and innovative criticism by offering concentrations in Literature, Creative Writing, Secondary Education, and Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. Our faculty has published on everything from Chaucer to comic books. Our teachers have won numerous University awards and are eager to serve the diverse students who come to LSU. Our undergraduates have gone on to a wide variety of careers, including law, medicine, business, journalism, advertising, the arts, and education. Our graduate students have gone on to academic careers, as well as careers in education and the arts.
Go to Undergraduate and Graduate Course Descriptions to see examples of what our Department has to offer and browse “About Us” to learn about our faculty, journals, and more.
Professor Joseph Kronick
Chair, Department of English
Spring 2022 English Course Spotlight
ENGL 4055-1: Studies in Novels
3:00 - 4:20 p.m. Tues/Thurs 100% web-based
Instructor: Michelle Massé
The "academic novel" seems to promise a pleasant (albeit snarkily knowing) romp through home territory. We all know what it means do be in school, right? Yet in exploring the terrain we soon find ourselves going in unexpected directions and asking new questions. Who gets to go to school? Who gets to graduate? Why does the academic novel cross over so often with murder, horror, and SF? What's the relationship between the genre and gender/race/class? How do genres rise historically, and what sociocultural issues do they shape/reflect? And how do we, as participants/observers, engage with these texts? We'll read texts ranging from classics such as Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited through modern examples such as the Harry Potter series to recent novels such as Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie's Americanah. We'll also frame our understanding of these texts through historical, social, and theoretical analyses about universities. Discussion format, reading journals and responses, two short essays, longer final essay, and class presentation.
ENGL 4109-1: Capstone Seminar in Screenwriting
3:00 - 5:50 p.m. Mon
Instructor: Zack Godshall
This is the semester you finish your screenplay. As you hone your craft as a screenwriter and sharpen your critical skills, you’ll complete a draft of a feature-length screenplay or teleplay. The course is a discussion-based writing workshop driven by oral and written communication and constructive criticism. You will also learn how to pitch, present, and submit your screenplay in a professional manner. Prereqs: ENGL 2009, ENGL 4009.
New Book by Dr. Pallavi Rastogi
Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century
Postcolonial Disaster studies literary fiction about crises of epic proportions in contemporary South Asia and Southern Africa: the oceanic disaster in Sri Lanka, the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the medical disaster in South Africa and Botswana, and the geopolitical disaster in India and Pakistan.
Dr. Pallavi Rastogi is an associate professor of English at LSU.
Middle-class African American English and the Language of Double Consciousness: A Personal Account
The 89th Southeastern Conference on Linguistics is pleased to present a public plenary address sponsored by the LSU College of Humanities & Social Sciences and the Department of English
Tracey L. Weldon
Department of English Language and Literature
The Linguistics Program, University of South Carolina
In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois famously articulated the experience of double consciousness as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” Over a century later, this experience still resonates with many African Americans, and perhaps especially many middle-class African Americans, who find themselves having to navigate multiple, and sometimes conflicting, norms and identities, given their more central positioning along the socioeconomic and sociocultural spectrum of American society. In this paper, I offer an autoethnographic account of my experience as a middle class, middle-aged, African American female from the southern U.S., who is a native speaker of AAE and a linguist. Using recordings of myself in a variety of settings, I explore the range of features that I employ along the standard-vernacular continuum and provide an analytic perspective that is, at once, both inductive and deductive in its approach. I also offer a glimpse into a segment of the African American speech community that has been underrepresented in sociolinguistic research and make the case for why linguists must continue to extend definitions of the African American speech community beyond the working classes.
When: Friday, April 1, 2022; 1:00 p.m. CDT (subject to change)
Where: Plenary Address (zoom link tbd), SECOL 89
For more information contact Southeastern Conference on Linguistics.
This event is free and open to the public.
The 89th Southeastern Conference on Linguistics
March 31-April 2, 2022 (virtual)
Call for Papers
Theme: Diversity and Inclusion in Linguistics
SECOL, founded in 1969, is the oldest regional linguistic association in the United States. the 89th SECOL meeting is hosted by Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge). We invite papers from all subdisciplines, striving for diversity and inclusion in our field.
We invite the following submissions:
-Abstracts of research papers for 20-minute presentations, up to 300 words, excluding title, tables, references
-Proposals for 90-minute panels, with a main panel abstract up to 500 words along with 300-word individual paper abstracts.
Electronic submissions open on October 21, 2021, managed through Easy Abstracts, at http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/SECOL89. All submissions must be received by January 21, 2022 (11:59 p.m. EST).
Authors may submit up to two abstracts, one individual and one joint. Abstracts will undergo double-blind review, so author names should not appear anywhere on abstracts. Papers on any topic in linguistics, in either English or Spanish, are welcome.
Questions may be addressed to the local hosts here.