Undergraduate
Welcome from the Director of Undergraduate Studies
Welcome to Harvard English! Our department is passionate about literature in all its forms and varieties. As a concentrator, you’ll read great works that shaped our world alongside text being written right now—and you might even write your own. Here, you will hone your skills in interpretation, critical thinking, and stylistic experimentation, gaining the tools to navigate our culture's boundless content. You will find kindred spirits in authors of the past and a thriving community of fellow literature lovers in the present.
We invite you to find your college home in English. Come meet our faculty, read and write with us, and discover the beautiful profundity of the literary life.
- Professor Beth Blum
A Student's Perspective
Program Administration
Lauren Bimmler
lbimmler@fas.harvard.eduUndergraduate Program Administrator
Lauren oversees the administration of the undergraduate concentration, and is a resource to concentrators and prospective concentrators on matters of program requirements, creative writing, advising, course selection, honors opportunities (senior thesis...
Beth Blum
bblum@fas.harvard.eduProfessor of English
Interim Director of Undergraduate Studies
*Currently accepting graduate student advisees
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (2014) Interests: Modern and contemporary literature; self-help and therapeutic culture; the history of reading; sociology; medical humanities; the conduct of life; temporality. I am a scholar of modernist and...
Maggie Doherty
doherty4@fas.harvard.eduVisiting Lecturer on English
Director of Junior Tutorials
Education: BA Yale (2007) PhD Harvard (2015) Interests: Narrative nonfiction, magazine journalism, literary criticism Maggie Doherty is the author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (2020), which won the...
Laura van den Berg
laura_vandenberg@fas.harvard.eduSenior Lecturer
Director of Creative Writing
Education: B.A., Rollins College (2005) M.F.A., Emerson College (2008) Interests: Fiction Writing Selected Works: State of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024); I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020); The Third Hotel...
Nick White
nwhite@fas.harvard.eduSenior Lecturer on Fiction
Assistant Director of Creative Writing
Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies
Education: B.S.E., Delta State University (2007) M.A., Mississippi State University (2009) M.F.A., Ohio State University (2013) Ph.D., University of Nebraska (2016) Nick White is the author of Sweet & Low and How to Survive a Summer . His short stories...
Leah Whittington
lwhittington@fas.harvard.eduProfessor of English
Director of Undergraduate Studies
*Currently accepting graduate student advisees
(On leave AY 2026-27)
Education: B.A., Harvard University (2002) Ph.D., Princeton University (2011) Interests: Early Modern English Literature; Classical Tradition and Reception; Continental Renaissance; Neo-Latin; Milton. Selected Works: Renaissance Suppliants (Oxford...
