Upcoming Events

"A journey into the life and work of Sigmund Freud in four acts, combining animation, dreams, and insights from leading psychoanalysts. It explores Freud's experiences of marginalization as a Jew in Vienna during Hitler's rise and how these shaped his theories and personal life."

Screening of the film followed by a panel discussion featuring the film's director, producer, and writer, Yair Qedar, with Penn faculty memberse Ian Fleishman (CIMS), Jean-Michel Rabaté (English and Comparative Literature), and Liliane Weissberg (FIGS and Comparative Literature) and audience Q&A. 

This event has been organized and generously sponsored by the departments of Cinema and Media Studies and Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies and by the programs in Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies, and Psychoanalytic Studies.

2026 ESSAY PRIZES (submission deadline: March 2, 2026 at noon)

College Alumni Society Henry Reed Prize
Awarded for the best essay written by an undergraduate on the literature of the English Renaissance.

Dosoretz Family Prize
Awarded annually for the best essay written by a graduating senior English major.

Nancy Rafetto Leach Sweeten Prize
Awarded annually for the best undergraduate essay on American Literature.

Phillip E. Goldfein Class of 1934 Shakespearean Prize
Awarded for the best undergraduate paper on Shakespeare.

The Annual Student Essay Prize requirements are the following:

1.  Only one entry per student per prize. If you enter two contests, you must submit one essay for each contest.

2.  Please do not submit the same essay for more than one prize.

3.  Essays from Spring 2026, Fall 2025, Spring 2025, and Fall 2024 are eligible.

4.  All submissions must be in by March 2, 2026, at noon.

Submit your entry below. Note that if you are applying for more than one contest, you need to submit to this link one time per entry.

https://upenn.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b3qpESc2x4cF8eF

For more information regarding the listed awards, contact Loretta M. Witham Turner in the English Department at:  loretta@upenn.edu. 

The English Honors Program provides majors with the opportunity to develop a substantial scholarly inquiry in close consultation with a faculty member. Selected students will explore cutting-edge research, workshop their drafts with fellow thesis writers, and present their scholarship to the Department. The final product is a 25-30 page thesis.

The deadline for applications to the 2026–27 Honors Program is March 15, 2026.

If you are accepted into the program, you will take the Honors seminar (ENGL 4097) in the Fall of your senior year. The class is primarily a writing workshop. You will read each other's work, sharing advice and intellectual support as you master the elements of critical writing.

Honors students usually continue working on the thesis in the Spring under the guidance of their faculty director. They must enroll in the English Honors independent study: ENGL 4098. Both English 4097 and English 4098 may count toward the required 13 courses for the major — both as elective seminars.

Completing the program is the only way to earn "Honors" in English upon graduation. To merit this distinction, theses must receive the enthusiastic approval of both the Faculty Director and the Director of the Honors Program. In cases where these two readers disagree, the Undergraduate Executive Committee will make the final determination.

Students wishing to write a creative thesis should consult the Creative Writing Program website at www.writing.upenn.edu for deadlines and information, or contact Julia Bloch.

Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in this biography for the first time. Baldwin: A Love Story has already garnered rave reviews and high critical praise. It was named a New York Times notable book of 2025 and a top 10 Book of 2025 by Time and The Atlantic.

Nicholas Boggs is the bestselling author of Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which is currently a finalist for the NBCC's John Leonard Prize and for the PEN/Jacqueline Bogard Weld Award for Biography. It was recently awarded the 2026 Stonewall Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book Award from the American Library Association. He is also the co-editor of Baldwin’s collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. The recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Please rsvp:  https://forms.gle/7WjzWNv88xq4hdkv9

Join AmLit and Gen/Sex for a talk by Mary Zaborskis (Associate Professor of English at Penn State Harrisburg and UPenn English PhD) on her first book, Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability (NYU Press 2024).  Queer Childhoods was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Studies and shortlisted for the Modern Language Association First Book Prize.

In addition to presenting on the arguments and interventions of the book, Professor Zaborskis will discuss the origins of the book as her dissertation project, the process of turning that dissertation into a book, and how the book is informing her current work and thinking.

Salt lakes are some of the world’s most extraordinary ecosystems, but nearly all of them—from the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea—are drying up, a harbinger of dust storms, rising sea levels, and worsening human health. In this dazzling love letter to strange and delicate waters and a moving odyssey into her own identity, Caroline Tracey takes readers across the American West and to Mexico, Argentina, and Kazakhstan to document salt lakes, their loss, and the efforts underway to save them. She explores how the lakes have reflected the fast–changing natural world through Mormon diaries, Soviet realist novels, and Australian Aboriginal paintings. And she unravels the lakes’ lessons for her own life as she finds queer love and a sense of home in an imperfect world. An unforgettable coming–of–age story and an exquisite work of nature writing, Salt Lakes is a moving call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives.

Caroline Tracey’s work in English and Spanish has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in geography from University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

This event is co-sponsored by the American Literature Working Group and the Landscape Architecture department lecture series. 

More details to be announced!

https://queerclassrelations.commons.gc.cuny.edu/graduate-student-pre-con...

The University of Pennsylvania is excited to partner with CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York to hold a symposium addressing the intersection of queer and trans experience and social class. We invite applications from students at any stage in their graduate study and in any discipline who are working on related questions and topics to take part in a day of faculty-led interactive workshops.

This symposium hopes to foster emerging scholarship that explores the connections between queer lives and class experiences. We’re particularly interested in work that addresses this intersection alongside race, caste, disability, gender, and nationality. The symposium will begin with an evening keynote by Justin Torres, author of Blackouts (winner, 2023 National Book Award for Fiction) and We the Animals (2011). The following day will consist of a combination of reading groups and workshops. In the spirit of cross-institution solidarity, we are proud to collaborate with CUNY and CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies on this event.

Please get in touch with Heather Love or Rylee Smith if you have any questions.

You're invited! Faculty, majors, and minors will gather in Fisher-Bennett Hall on April 30, 2026 for an end-of-year celebration. Winners of the annual Department of English essay prizes will be announced as we celebrate a fabulous year at Penn!

 THE NOVEL AND LABOR WORKSHOP

May 1st, Kelly Writer’s House, room 202.

9.00-10.00 Novel & Labor on the Plantation 

Mariana Akawi (University of Pennsylvania) & Jack Fixa (UC Irvine) 

Comments & Chair: Yoon Sun Lee (Wellesley) 

10.15-11.15 “A mouth, a milking-pail, and a threshing machine”: Reproductive Labors in the Novel 

Ronny Litvack-Katzman (Harvard) & Lisa Koyuki Smith (The Graduate Center, CUNY) 

Comments & Chair: Lilith Todd (University of Pennsylvania) 

11.15-11.45 Coffee Break 

11.45-12.45 Home Factories in the Novel 

Ashley Cullina (Yale) & Eileen Ying (University of Pennsylvania) 

Comments & Chair: David Kurnick (Rutgers) 

12.45-1.30 Lunch Break

1.30-2.30 Unusual Forms for the Novel & Labor 

Brandon Rushton (University of Notre Dame) & Ruoxi Zhu (University of Pennsylvania)

Comments & Chair: Arielle Zibrak (University of Wyoming)  

2.45.-3.45 Numbing & Sanitizing: Creative Labor & the Neoliberal Novel 

Yoojung Chun (Harvard) & Rachael Mulvihill (Carnegie Mellon University) 

Comments & Chair: Dora Zhang (UC Berkeley)  

5-7 PUBLIC PANEL:  THE NOVEL AND REPRODUCTIVE LABOR

Lilith Todd, "Mary Wollstonecraft's Weaning Forms." 

Dora Zhang, "Reproducing People: On Types and Stereotypes."

Arielle Zibrak, "The Destructive Imagination of the Eugenic Novel Heroine." 

DINNER FOR WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS AT 4506 Chester Ave.

Saturday, May 2nd 

Fisher Bennett Hall, Room 222

10.00-11.00 Labor & the Novel in a State of Emergency 

Michael Williamson (Binghamton University) & Xavier Xin (University of Pennsylvania) 

Comments & Chair: Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania)

11.15-12.00 Round Up (Tina Lupton, Chair)