Rutgers English Department News

Assistant Professor Matthew Aiello 

We are delighted to welcome Matthew Aiello to the English Department at Rutgers University.

Having received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, Professor Aiello was selected for a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows for his scholarship on medieval England, particularly of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. He will join the department in Fall 2026. 

A daring theorist, Professor Aiello generates connections across periods in ways that open new possibilities for medieval studies. His areas of research and teaching span a range of topics in language and literature, including Old and Middle English, Latin, French, book history, trauma theory, and postcolonial studies. His current book project, Writing Under Duress: Trauma and Repetition in Early Medieval England, 1065-1250, investigates the so-called "lost" period of English literary history—the 200-year aftermath of the Norman Conquest of 1066, when literatures in English were thought to have all but disappeared. Rather than working to combat claims of loss, as others in this period have done, Writing Under Duress embraces the richness of loss for what it can reveal about the textual and historical conditions of post-Conquest England.

Professor Aiello's work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Speculum, JEGP, Exemplaria, New Medieval Literatures, and the Review of English Studies. His extraordinary profile is already garnering recognition in the field and beyond, and promises an elevated, public-facing role for Rutgers medievalists.

Professor Tina Lupton

Professor Lupton's distinguished scholarship brings the rigor and historical depth of 18th-century literary studies to bear on contemporary media theory, establishing the history of reading as an indispensable framework for current work in media studies.

Professor Lupton is the author of several monographs and editor of numerous scholarly collections. Her award-winning first book, Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), examines how 18th-century British authors employed metafictional techniques to foreground the materiality and technological dimensions of the book as object. Reading and the Making of Time in the Age of British Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) challenges contemporary assumptions about distracted reading by demonstrating that 18th-century readers navigated similar temporal constraints, advancing an argument about reading's capacity to constitute temporality through non-linear practices. Her co-authored Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford University Press, 2022), awarded the 2022 British Association for Contemporary Literature Monograph Prize, employs sociological methodologies to investigate reading practices during lockdown, illuminating how encounters with reading technologies shape literary interpretation.

Professor Lupton has edited several volumes, including the Oxford World's Classics edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and journal special issues including "Latour and the Eighteenth Century" for The Eighteenth Century. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her creative nonfiction work, Love and the Novel: Life After Reading (2022), received wide critical acclaim.

A scholar of exceptional range, Professor Lupton brings expertise in 18th-century literary studies, contemporary reading practices, book history, media theory, and literary sociology to the department.

Professor Heather Love

A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of numerous awards, Heather stands at the vanguard of contemporary literary and cultural studies. Her wide-ranging scholarship encompasses queer theory and gender studies, 20th and 21st century literature and culture, affect theory, disability studies, performance theory, and visual/media studies. Her work bridges literature and sociology and engages deeply with questions of critical methodology.

Heather is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has edited several pathbreaking journal special issues. Her landmark 2007 book, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, remains central to ongoing conversations about emotion and politics in queer studies. Her most recent book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021), has generated a major—and widely remarked upon—disciplinary rapprochement between sociology and literary studies, one with which scholars across fields continue to grapple. Heather is currently at work on To Be Real: The Uses of the Personal in Queer Criticism, under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Conversations is an inquiry-based exhibition designed to expand the innovative curriculum of “College Writing,” the gateway composition course for first-year students at Rutgers University. It examines the ways in which a diverse range of artists have harnessed the power of image/text relations and visual culture to make critical arguments about the world through themes such as political activism, identity, community, and mediation. Throughout the Fall 2024 semester, students will interpret the artworks through in-gallery assignments and other creative activities that focus on object-centered learning and careful visual analysis.

More info HERE

Congratulations to Evie Shockley. Evie's book of poetry suddenly we won the NCAAP Image award for Poetry.

55th NAACP Image Awards - Literature

At this solar eclipse party, expect to be handed eclipse glasses, folding chairs, books, a microphone – and apples.

On Monday, April 8, as the moon hurtles through its orbit on a path that will inevitably lead it between the Earth and sun, members of the Rutgers–New Brunswick Department of English will mark this year’s solar eclipse in their own way. Gathering at Voorhees Mall, they will take turns reciting lines from “Paradise Lost,” one of literature’s best-known poems showcasing an epic battle between goodness, represented as light, and evil, depicted as darkness.

Participants, who will start at 9:30 a.m. and finish at about 6 p.m., will read aloud every word of John Milton’s blank verse poem depicting the biblical fall from grace of Adam and Eve – all 12 books and more than 10,000 lines of verse. And for this “Paradise Eclipsed” event, they’re inviting everyone – students especially, but also faculty, staff and members of the public – to join them as readers to help them do it.

Learn more HERE.

Critical AI 2.1 is a special issue, co-edited by Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Matthew Stone, collecting interdisciplinary essays and think pieces on a wide range of topics involving Large Language Models. Below, a sneak preview from the issue: Maurice Wallace and Matthew Peeler’s compelling “Harriet Tubman’s Deep Voice”

Early in 2021, MyHeritage, said to be “the world’s leading genealogy website,” partnered with D-ID, an Israeli platform for so-called generative AI, to launch a new feature called “Deep Nostalgia.” Deep Nostalgia™ focalizes and animates the faces of family members and other historical figures pictured in old photographs to create a live effect. Forebears long since departed smile, blink, look sidewise, and tilt or narrowly turn their heads.

Read the full article HERE

Below is an excerpt from Jorden Sanders' short essay for the Black Bibliography Project blog: "The Stories Books Tell":

How often do you think about the lives who have touched a book? We’re accustomed to thinking about the lives that books touch—the way their content moves hearts and changes minds unbounded by time—but do we consider how we interact with the material object itself? How many hands have held its weight or flipped through its pages? In a world where books are often imagined to be products of machine labor, purchased new, or read in digital formats, it is easy for the histories of the book itself to slip our minds.

Read the full article HERE

The CCA’s new journal, Critical AI, is now live on the Duke University Press website. The journal’s first issue, DATA WORLDS, is edited by Katherine Bode (ANU) and Lauren Goodlad (Rutgers).

Though some of the authors and topics will be new to colleagues in the humanities and social sciences, there will be familiar names as well including an introductory essay by Bode and Goodlad; an essay by Christopher J. Newfield calling for epistemic equality; a manifesto on scrapism by artist Sam Lavigne; a multidisciplinary interview with design justice theorist Sasha-Costanza-Chock edited by former Rutgers grad student Kristin Rose (Vanderbilt); and review essays by Heather Love (Penn), Seth Perlow (Georgetown), anthropologist France Winddance Twine (Santa Barbara).  

Critical AI

Congratulations to Evie Shockley. Evie's book of poetry suddenly we made the shortlist for the National Book Award in Poetry. The winner will be announced on November 15th.

2023 National Book Awards - Poetry

Rebecca Walkowitz's opinion piece, "Gutting Language Departments Would Be a Disaster" was published on September 19th in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The article discusses the critical importance of basic and applied research, as well as teaching, in world language and literature disciplines 

Gutting Language Departments Would Be a Disaster

Rutgers Today wrote a moving tribute to Bridget Gellert Lyons, a former Rutgers English professor and Department Chair.

Bridget Gellert Lyons Remembered for Her Legacy as a Consummate Teacher Bridget Gellert Lyons Remembered for Her Legacy as a Consummate Teacher

Dana Omirova has been chosen as the winner of the 2023 Fair Unknown Award for Best Graduate Paper on an Arthurian topic given at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Dana's essay, “Mass Exploitation of Women in Romance: Chrétien, Malory, and the Case of the Weavers,”  was selected from among a large number of excellent submissions. Dana will work with the journal's editors to revise and expand the paper to an article, and it will be published in issue 34.1, which comes out in early 2024. The committee was really pleased with Dana's essay and believes it is poised to be an important contribution to the field.

Congratulations to David Kurnick, recipient of a Presidential Outstanding Faculty Scholar Award. The award honors newly promoted full professors whose breadth of academic portfolios reflect outstanding research, scholarship, or creative work, as well as truly outstanding contributions to teaching along with extensive service to the Rutgers community and beyond.  

 View David Kurnick's profile.