English Graduate Student Association
The English Graduate Student Association is the primary graduate student organization within the department. The EGSA is an independent body organized by the graduate students themselves, and it advances the interests of all graduate English students to departmental and university administrators, provides valuable resources to members at every phase of the University’s program in English, and fosters a vibrant intellectual community among English graduate students.
Here are the officers for the current academic year:
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For information about any of the following groups, or for schedules of events, please email any of the EGSA officers listed above
Green Lines - Environmental Humanities
Green Lines is an environmental humanities reading group that aims to bring together the wide-ranging conversations about the environment and the non-human that are taking place at BU and beyond, and to generate new, inter-disciplinary strands of inquiry that cut through the silos of individual departments. We meet several times a semester and remotely during the summer. Meetings are a mixture of speaker events, in which we hear from faculty doing exciting work across the environmental humanities; and group discussions, in which we grapple with a reading or two. Email greenlinesbu@gmail.com if you’d like to be added to the mailing list, and follow us on Twitter @greenlinesbu.
Graduate Writing Workshop
The grad student workshop is an opportunity for students in our department to both receive feedback from their fellow students on their work and be exposed to what others in the department are working on and offer feedback. Students can submit anything that they would like to have looked at—article drafts, conference papers, prospectus drafts, dissertation chapters, seminar papers, etc. For everything but the conference papers, we will circulate the drafts ahead of time to those interested, and we will discuss the feedback during the workshop together. The workshop is a very collaborative and welcoming environment and an excellent resource to students of all graduate levels in our department.
Fiction Club
The BU English Graduate Fiction Club meets two to three times each semester to discuss short fiction, usually contemporary short stories. Fiction Club provides an informal opportunity for graduate students at all stages to have conversations about stories, craft, and the pleasure of reading short fiction.
Poetry Reading Series
The Poetry Reading Series is a poetry club that meets about three times a semester to discuss poetry selected based on their relevance to the theme of the semester. In the past, themes have included Funny Poems, where we read poems by Ogden Nash and Patricia Lockwood; Poetry and Science, with poems by Edmund Spenser and Tracey K Smith; and Contemporary Poets, with work by Chen Chen and Ilya Kaminsky. The Series is a wonderful opportunity to chat about poetry from across centuries with people across cohorts and specialties.
Film Screening Series
The Graduate Film Screening Series is a space where English graduate students can learn from each other and practice reading and interpreting film in an informal academic setting. It is also an opportunity to think about the way familiar literary terms are transformed or recontextualized in new media. The films for each of our monthly meetings are curated around a guiding theme and introduced to the group with notes on the film’s history and/or a relevant element of film theory. Attendees watch and then discuss a film together over food and drink. These discussions involve close-reading scenes, characters, dialogue, themes, imagery, and the effect of specific film techniques on the audience. Previous Film Series topics have included Hitchcock, blockbusters, and “The Stranger in Film” paired with information on auteur theory, queer theory, “the male gaze,” psychoanalysis and cinema, and structuralism. Once per semester, an English department faculty member–sometimes as a film scholar, and sometimes as a film fan–is invited to introduce a film and lead group discussion.