Dear Seniors,
Participating in our traditional commencement ceremony is one of the best parts—in fact, the best part of being chair of the English department, and so I was extraordinarily disappointed when it became clear that we simply could not have this kind of ceremony this year. However, one silver lining to this cloud is that our yearbook project now allows us to see, in so much more detail than would be possible in a short ceremony, how and why our majors are so incredible. Each of our graduating seniors has taken their own path through our major, some focusing more on writing poetry or writing fiction, others emphasizing medieval literature, and others exploring contemporary African-American literature in depth (to name just a few of the areas in which students in our department specialize). But what ties together these individual paths through our major is a shared love for language, and, more specifically, a love for the ways in which people can be moved by means of carefully crafted sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, images, and narratives. We are all, in other words, the kind of people who are constantly on the lookout for incredible, mesmerizing sentences—sentences that make us say either, “I want to be able to write a sentence like that,” or “I want to understand how that sentence works to create such a dense and complex sense of meaning, and I want to show other people how and why it works in that way.” Thank you, graduating seniors, for sharing your love of language, and your perspectives on language and literature, with us! Please continue to cultivate your interest in beautiful and meaningful language, and—perhaps even more important–invent new ways of bringing that love of language to others. And please stay in touch! We continue to develop ways for our alumni to keep in touch with one another and the department, and we would love to have you to continue to be part of our department.
Best,
Rob Mitchell
Marcello Lotti Professor of English
Chair, English Department
