Duke University English Department

What Happens When Everyone Can Be a Writer? Aarthi Vadde’s New Book Asks Just That Aarthi Vadde, E.

Trinity College Honors Four Staff Members with Dean’s Pillar of Excellence Awards The 2026 awards honor individuals who consistently demonstrate outstanding service, leadership, initiative, community, collaboration, enthusiasm and inclusion.

Big Questions, Bold Research: Trinity Honors 2026 Distinguished Dissertation Award Recipients Now in its second cohort, the award honors three members of Trinity's graduating Ph.D. class who demonstrated remarkable outstanding scholarship and academic excellence.

Trinity in Four Acts: Daniella Freedman Sophomore year is when things start to click, and the unknowns become the familiar. Classes feel more purposeful, friendships run deeper, routines develop and campus becomes home. As our four Trinity students return, the series picks back up to follow their next chapter focused on exploring new oppo...

Professor Jaji will give the Annual Juneteenth Lecture!

Marking Juneteenth as the arrival of freedom in isolated spaces, Professor Jaji traces collaborations between Black poets and concert musicians - from the Jubilee Singers to contemporary Grammy-nominated works - showing how art preserves the history of enslavement in collective memory. The event concludes with a communal singing of Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing. 🔔 Save the date and register now for our Juneteenth Lecture 2026! 🗓June 18, 2026 🕕18:00–19:30 📍Festsaal, Universität Bonn, Am Hof 1, 53113 Bonn For more information and registration, visit: https://buff.ly/jjbnMEH @nas.bonn @universitaetbonn @dfg__public

Are you an undergraduate who enjoys creative writing? You could win an award for your talents!

The Rudolph William Rosati Creative Writing Award

The Rosati Creative Writing Prize is awarded each spring in recognition of an outstanding work of creative writing. All Duke first year or sophomore students are eligible to submit work for consideration. Projects may be any genre and take any form (audio/video, digital media, etc.), but must include a substantial creative writing component.

Deadline: June 15th, 2026

Prize: $1500

For more details: https://library.duke.edu/research/awards/rosati

The William Styron Creative Writing Award

The Styron Creative Writing Prize is awarded each spring in recognition of an outstanding work of creative writing. All Duke juniors and seniors are eligible to submit work for consideration. Projects may be any genre and take any form (audio/video, digital media, etc.), but must include a substantial creative writing component.

Deadline: June 15th, 2026

Prize: $1500

For more details: https://library.duke.edu/research/awards/styron

Eligibility for both awards:

You must be a Duke first year or sophomore student (or just finished that year). Duke juniors and seniors may apply for the William Styron Creative Writing Award.
You may submit no more than three different projects in a given year. Each project should be submitted individually with an accompanying application.
Submitted projects must have been written during the current academic year
At this time submissions must be written in English
No minimum length. No more than 50 pages for each submission can be submitted. The total work can be longer, but in that case only submit a carefully selected sample.

Contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Librarian for Literature, at [email protected], if you have questions.

"Everything & the Universe" was directed by Sarah Scarlett Downing, a former Duke English PhD Duke Student Involvement and Leadership.

Filmed in Durham, a New Movie About Cosmic Coincidences Has Flown Under the Radar Durham is somewhat of a main character in 'Everything & the Universe,' streaming since last year on Amazon Prime. Why has no one heard of it?

For Trisha Santanam ‘26, ENG390 is The Class That Changed Everything 💙 In the spring of her freshman year, Trisha took “Southern Music and Literature.” This class set the entire course of her intellectual life at Duke. Co-taught by @duke_english professor Taylor Black and @musicatduke professor Sophia Enriquez, the course revealed two core concepts that Trisha hadn’t considered before: that literature and music could be studied together, and that a “text” didn’t have to mean just words on a page. When she read Professor Black’s article “Folk and Blues Methods in American Literature and Criticism,” she realized she didn’t have to choose between two things she loved. The blues — a genre she couldn’t have described or named a single artist from at the time — became a universe she now plans to explore in her doctoral work. For Trisha, the class wasn’t just intellectually transformative. It also showed her what great teaching looks like: professors who are committed to their students’ growth as humans and scholars, inside the classroom and beyond. Trisha graduated from @dukeuniversity this May as a Four-County Area Trinity Scholar, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and 2025 Faculty Scholar 🎓 This fall, she’ll begin a PhD in English at @columbia.

https://english.duke.edu/news/2026-phd-hooding-ceremony-recap

2026 Ph.D. Hooding Ceremonies: Photos and Videos | The Graduate School On May 9, 2025, The Graduate School held two Ph.D. Hooding Ceremonies at Duke Chapel to celebrate its 2025–⁠2026 doctoral graduates. Duke's largest Ph.D. class ever, 466

A 60-Year Duke Professor on Literature, Grade Inflation, and Whether Academia Will Survive Victor Strandberg is retiring at age 91. The English professor reflects on what’s changed—including Blue Devils basketball—and what comes next for him.