09/24/2025
Greetings from the English Department!
At the beginning of most semesters, I teach the work of the nineteenth-century English writer William Blake, whose wonderful poem “The Tyger” describes that titular creature “burning bright, / In the forests of the night.” There are lots of ways to understand that line (and the poem that contains it), but at Trinity, surrounded by young Tigers, I can’t help but read it as an image of a powerful beacon in a dark world. After all, such beaconish light is what the humanities provide, and in the English Department, we’re so proud to be a part of that glow.
Trinity is currently holding its annual 1869 Challenge, and we’d be deeply grateful if you would consider making a gift to support the light that the English Department works so hard to kindle and sustain. Past gifts from alumni like you have sent students to conferences, supported a student-run book club, funded social events (such as a Halloween reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”), paid for class-enhancing “extras” (such as visiting speakers or local travel), and even allowed faculty members to include special illustrations in their field-changing publications. Put simply, the monies that we’ve received through the 1869 Challenge have played a crucial role in ensuring that our students receive a top-notch education at the hands of world-class faculty.
A few updates from the third floor of Dicke Hall:
• Our alumni have enrolled in graduate programs in English and Creative Writing and pursued post-graduate degrees in law, medicine, and more. They’ve also begun careers in education, business, non-profit leadership, and other important fields.
• Majors have gained hands-on experience in manuscript labs and scholarly editing labs.
• Advanced majors have conducted self-guided research (advised by faculty) both during the summer and, in the form of independent studies and senior theses, during the academic year.
• Students across the University have enrolled (or will enroll!) in new courses, including, among others, Disability in the Nineteenth Century; Storytelling as Resistance; Mystery and Suspense Generative Fiction Workshop; Adventure Writing; and The ’90s.
• Students have blossomed in Jenny Browne’s faculty-led study abroad experience in Northern Ireland, the first such offering in the English Department.
• Faculty have published (or will publish!) several important scholarly and creative works, including, among others, Victoria Aarons’s The Story’s Not Over: Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives; Michael Fischer’s How Books Can Save Democracy; Andrew Porter’s The Imagined Life; David Rando’s Artificial Fiction: Imagining Literary Possibility Beyond the Human; Willis Salomon’s Jazz, Race, and Writing, 1945-1970; Katie Santos’s Shakespeare in Tongues; and Betsy Tontiplaphol’s The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality.
Please help us continue to “burn bright.” Let’s make this a day to remember!
With gratitude,
Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol
Professor and Chair, Department of English
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