A message from the chair

June 5, 2020

The Wake Forest University English Department affirms its solidarity with Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and authoritarianism in Winston-Salem, across the United States, and around the world.  

As Associate Dean and Associate Professor of English Erica Still recently wrote to the Wake Forest community, “The truth is that black Americans have been made to suffer for generations, and that suffering did not end with any of the important milestones achieved through the legal prohibition of slavery, the advances of the Civil Rights era, or even the election of the country’s first African American president. The evidence is overwhelming: black life remains threatened.” In the English Department we recognize that while the study of literature, language, rhetoric, and creative writing has sometimes exposed injustice, these projects have also served a status quo based on black suffering. Put another way: we recognize that the world we live in is structured on black suffering and has been since at least 1619 in America. Much more than diversifying the canon, we have to understand the relationship of the aesthetic objects of literature and the projects of analytical writing to the political economy of enslavement. 

The English Department is working to express our solidarity with Black Lives Matter by doing more to center black life in our curriculum and scholarship and to support our black students and faculty members; we also work in our teaching, scholarship, administrative work, and service to the University and the community to dismantle the structures of white supremacy that continue to shape the daily lived experience of us all. 

Jessica Richard, Chair

Wake Forest University Department of English