Fitchburg State University English Studies Department

08/27/2026

I signed my first baby up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library when she was one week old, at the advice of her pediatrician. It was May 2020, and the pandemic was just beginning to close its fist…

08/04/2026

AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.

07/28/2026

07/23/2026

Check out recent English Studies graduate and Sigma Tau Delta Honor Society member Adriana Kruger's article for the national Sigma Tau Delta blog!

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1dTLxmwAuR/

Students are outsourcing their thinking and research, using ChatGPT to write their essays and aggregate their sources. The work we have our students do isn’t...

07/17/2026

07/15/2026

Do you think literature can actually change the world?

07/14/2026

Dr. Kisha Tracy wrote a short article for Open Education Global! Check it out here: https://twp.ai/IltKgh

Is "free" the same as "democratic"?

It's a question at the heart of the Open Education movement — and one that Dr. Kisha G. Tracy takes on honestly and personally in the latest piece in our Come Invent With Us: Perspectives on OEGlobal26 series.

Dr. Tracy is Professor and Chair of English Studies at Fitchburg State University, co-chair of OLERAC — one of the three co-hosts of — and a member of the conference Steering Committee. Her article draws on her own experience of unlearning to ask what Open Education truly owes its students, especially those from marginalized communities.

"It is not only the product that should be open, but the process itself — as we help each other learn, point out internalized assumptions and biases, and broaden our scope of understanding and empathy."

👉 Read the full article: https://twp.ai/IltKgh

Join us at this October! Early Bird rates close August 9. Register: https://twp.ai/E5E5Ud

07/06/2026

Ahead of Christopher Nolan's big screen adaptation of The Odyssey, the oldest known surviving book copy of Homer's epic made an appearance at the film's press junket in New York, on loan courtesy of the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester. The fragment dates back to somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, meaning it has survived roughly 1,700 years of history to sit in the same room as the film's cast.

Nolan's version stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, with the actor reportedly cutting gluten and dropping to 167 pounds while growing a full beard for a year to play the role, alongside Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus. The film was shot entirely on IMAX 70mm across locations including Morocco, Greece, Iceland and Scotland, with a reported budget of around 250 million dollars, and Nolan has said he pushed for an R rating because he wanted the brutality of the era to feel visceral rather than softened for a PG-13 audience.

There's something fitting about a nearly two thousand year old manuscript sitting next to a modern blockbuster built on the same story, especially with Nolan citing a 2017 translation by classicist Emily Wilson as one of his key references for how he approached Odysseus's character.

Would seeing a manuscript that old up close change how you think about a story you already know well?

07/06/2026

06/08/2026

Missy Dunaway’s colorful illustrations combine natural history, folklore and literature to depict the Bard’s birds