News

Josh Galarza, who is in his third year of the MFA in Creative Writing program at VCU, returned to adolescence for his debut novel, “The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky.” (Photo contributed by Josh Galarza)

In debut novel, VCU creative writing student Josh Galarza brings life to teen experience

July 23, 2024

The MFA candidate shares the inspiration for his young adult title and the lessons he has learned.

Now in its third year, the VCU Breakthroughs Fund has supported more than 30 projects through investments totaling nearly $6 million. (Enterprise Marketing and Communications)

VCU Breakthroughs Fund provides grants to 10 more faculty-led projects that pursue transformative innovation

July 2, 2024

Health, equity, sustainability and the human experience are the driving forces for transdisciplinary teams that target society’s grand challenges.

Alice Winn’s debut novel, “In Memoriam,” is “dazzling and wrenching, witty and wildly romantic,” according to Lev Grossman. (The photo on the right is by Jamie Ting)

Alice Winn wins the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for ‘In Memoriam’

July 1, 2024

Author will be featured at public event on campus on Nov. 19.

Paul Woody writes during the VCU men’s basketball team’s run to the Final Four in 2011. “Several of us went to Houston directly from the regional in San Antonio and since we’d only packed for the weekend, we needed to set up a ‘satellite’ office in a Houston laundromat,” Woody said. (Photo by Dean Hoffmeyer)

VCU alum and Richmond sportswriting veteran Paul Woody inducted into Virginia Sports Hall of Fame

April 26, 2024

Woody’s 40-year career had roots on campus and included coverage of Super Bowls and the Rams’ Final Four run in the 2011 NCAA tournament – and featured thousands of bylines.

National Endowment for the Humanities grants will help to establish a health humanities minor and support a professor’s book project. (Enterprise Marketing and Communications)

National Endowment for the Humanities awards two grants to VCU projects

April 18, 2024

One will establish a health humanities minor, while the other supports a professor’s book project on visual images of African Americans in leisure contexts from slavery through the Jim Crow era.

Nicholas Frankel, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of English, will use the support of a Guggenheim fellowship to work on a book about the career of 19th-century polymath William Morris. (Contributed photo)

VCU English professor Nicholas Frankel honored with prestigious Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship for 2024

April 16, 2024

Known for his works on Oscar Wilde, Frankel is now developing a book about Victorian designer, writer and activist William Morris.

The Passing of Nick Sharp

April 15, 2024

Nick Sharp passed earlier this month. Nick was a long time member of our department, coming to the department in 1971, only a couple of years after the founding of the university, and retiring in 2016. Nick was a generous and welcoming colleague to many of our current faculty when we first arrived at VCU and his presence has been sorely missed since his retirement.

“Remembering Paule: A Photo Memoir of Her Richmond Years” chronicles the friendship of Daryl Cumber Dance and Paule Marshall, the first tenured Black professors in the VCU Department of English. The photo on the cover was taken in March 1995 at Howard University when Dance and Marshall attended Toni Morrison’s gala establishing The Sterling A. Brown Chair.

Department of English

College of Humanities and Sciences