Department of English

The English department launched a new initiative at the beginning of the 2025-26 academic year, called the Critical-Creative Studies Initiative (CCSI). Peggy Phelan will serve as the CCSI Director during its pilot phase. In the interview below, Peggy Phelan and Gavin Jones, Chair of the English Department, discuss this exciting new initiative. Ques...

In The Wayfinder, award-winning author and Stanford Professor Adam Johnson draws on the cultures and landscapes of the Polynesian islands to tell a story set 1,000 years in the past – with timely echoes for today.The new novel from Adam Johnson, the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing and professor of English in the School of...

Leading a team of Stanford undergraduates, including three English majors, in a multi-year effort to transcribe, data visualize, and historically contextualize Virginia Woolf’s book sales records, Alice Staveley, along with Victoria Ding, Emily Elott, Khuyen N. Le, Ekalan Hou and Peter Morgan, has published the first combined digital humanities and...