Department of English

Welcome to the Harvard English Department

Take a look at this year's course offerings.

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Undergraduates

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Graduate Students

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Creative Writing

The English Department is proud to be a home for creative writing at Harvard. The vital presence of creative writing in the department is reflected by our many distinguished authors who offer small, intensive workshops each term in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting, and television writing. Concentrators may also apply to work on a year-long creative senior thesis with our faculty.

Latest News

Elevating a character at the heart of Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’

October 13, 2026

The FAS Current covered the Harvard Foundation and Office for the Arts' event about the new Netflix adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Hoon Lee '94, who plays Lee in the series, was joined by co-showrunner, writer, and executive producer Zoe...

Finding Their Way in ‘Masquerade’

October 06, 2026

This past summer, three Harvard students helped transport Manhattan audiences to Parisian rooftops, to opera house dressing rooms, and to a subterranean labyrinth. Tanner Quirk ’29, Alicia Chu ’28, and recent graduate Saman de Silva ’26, spent more than...

Graduate Student Emily Sun's First Article in Journal of English and Germanic Philology

September 29, 2026

English Department graduate student Emily Sun's first journal article, "Lost (and Found) in Translation: Enigmatic and Exilic Bodies in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre," has been published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology . The link to...

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Featured Faculty

Glenda Carpio

carpio@fas.harvard.edu

Chair of the Department of English

Harvard College Professor

Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature

*Currently accepting graduate student advisees

Education: B.A., Vassar (1991) Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley (2002) Interests: The Literature, History and Culture of New World Slavery; African-American Literature and Visual Art; Anglophone Caribbean Literature; Native American and Latino...

Josh Bell

joshuabell@fas.harvard.edu

Senior Lecturer on Poetry

Education: B.A., Indiana State University (1994) M.A., Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (1997) M.F.A., University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1999) Ph.D., University of Cincinnati (2013) Interests: Poetry, creative writing Selected Works: No...

Homi Bhabha

hbhabha@fas.harvard.edu

Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities

*Currently accepting graduate student advisees

Education: B.A., University of Bombay (1970) MPhil., M.A., D.Phil, Christ Church, Oxford (1990) Interests: Cosmopolitanism; human rights in the context of aesthetics and culture; the works of Joseph Conrad, Walter Benjamin, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, V...

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Arts and Humanities Division

The Division seeks to optimize both the ability of its faculty to pursue knowledge through the study of the arts and humanities and the opportunity of its students to share in that pursuit.

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