Alumni & Friends

We are immensely proud of our alumni and friends. Recent grads and long-time supporters, die-hard Badgers and lifelong learners, more than 14,000 people have been a part of the English Department's educational mission as students, instructors, donors, and staff members. These are the people who, through their generous support, allow us to keep teaching, keep studying, and keep contributing to the rich intellectual life of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

We are deeply committed to maintaining, improving, and growing our exceptional community of alumni and friends. In these pages, you can:

• Find out how to give to the English Department, and what those gifts can do!
• Read about our distinguished Board of Visitors
• Catch up on the Department and other alumni with our alumni newsletter, Annotations

Message from the Chair

Theresa Kelley, Chair
Department of English

As chair, I hope that alumni will long remain part of our far-flung community. In fundamental ways, you and the students we now teach are essential to our future. Higher education at the great public universities is under enormous stress from failing state budgets and this situation will not reverse itself. More than ever, we ask you, our alumni community, to support the public education we give.

That support can take many forms. Giving to this department is one important way that you can help. Without English alumni support we would not have the funds to support either faculty development and research or our students, many of whom work to fund their educations. But it is also critical that you support English at UW-Madison to the wider public, where knowledge of the strengths of public education, its faculty, and its students will help to insure public recognition of the contributions of this and other public universities to the future of this republic.

In spite of these recent upheavals in public education, our department has managed to work, expand, and evolve. We have revised our undergraduate major to create more opportunities for students to work with faculty in small, writing intensive courses, and we have been moving ahead with plans for a network of internships specifically for English majors. We are happy to welcome our new undergraduate advisor, Karen Redfield, who holds a Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric from this department and has taught and advised college students for many years. And we are delighted to celebrate as a group the accomplishments of Alexis Brown, our first Rhodes Scholar and an outstanding member of our community.

Our faculty have widened and deepened our collective range of expertise, thanks in part to Mellon support for new digital humanities projects, archival and critical analyses of Renaissance and American literatures, and the study of modern British and global cultures. We have recently completed searches for new faculty members in Composition & Rhetoric and Eighteenth Century studies, as well as for a Mellon Foundation-funded position in early modern print culture. We aspire to be the best public university English department in the nation, and recent National Research Council survey data suggest that we are well on our way.

Please keep in touch. You are part of who we are and who we will become.