Department of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago

Congratulations to on receiving the 2026 Dean’s Award for Graduate Student Teaching Excellence at !

Among other teaching that she has done in the Department of English , Kashaf taught a course titled “Medieval Desire” in Winter 2025, in which (quoting from her teaching statement),

“students explore the psychic and social contours of what medieval subjects wanted and how these desires intersected with gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. I teach students to analyze Middle English lyrics, mystical manuals, dream-visions, and fictional tales alongside theories of desire from psychoanalysis and affect theory. For instance, we read the 14th-century allegory Pearl alongside Lauren Berlant’s Desire/Love, discovering that both medieval religious imaginaries and modern critical theory relish in the idea that desire is an act of misrecognizing the thing one wants—a jolting lesson in the transhistorical potency of estrangement.”

Students in the new Research Methods class got to visit yesterday to look at some cool things from the archives, including Brooks’s “We real cool” and the accompanying correspondence.

may have , but we’ve got Dale the Snail. Drop by Lex’s office to say hi and meet our department’s newest member.

From “Burial Practice” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53714/burial-practice

Join us for the history and form of the lyric lecture by Prof. Chandler on Wednesday January 22nd 5-6 with a reception to follow.