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English departments nowadays are big tents, housing experts on everything from Chaucer and Shakespeare to LGBTQ and diaspora literature. Increasingly, departments are tweaking their names to reflect this diversity.
Cornell University’s Board of Trustees, for instance, recently approved the English department’s vote to rebrand itself as the department of literatures in English. Department professors Carole Boyce-Davies, Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Derrick Spires proposed the idea last summer, writing in an open letter that the “double pandemic of COVID-19 and global racism, along with the demands for decolonized institutions, have brought a new urgency to ongoing questions about how racism functions in symbolic and structural ways.”