John M. Warner Writing Internship Endowment

Created in 2010 by the Casement Fund Ltd. to honor Professor Emeritus John M. Warner as an exemplary teacher of English literature and language.  The John M. Warner Writing Internship Endowment will provide Drew students of English with stipends to support undergraduate academic internships in industries related to writing.

John T. Cunningham Internship for Excellence in Journalism

Established in 2010 by Michael K. Smullen C’03 to promote journalistic excellence in the community at large and in university-related publications, to attract prospective students who have an affinity for journalism and to benefit students who dedicate significant time and effort to producing excellent journalism and who are interested in pursuing careers in journalism after graduation.

McEvoy Internship Endowment

Endowed in 2012 by the Nan T. Mcevoy Foundation Fund to help qualified students participate in professional internships in the fields of media, publishing and communications.  The internship stipend awarded annually to qualified students who demonstrate financial need.

Senior capstone projects are ambitious explorations of research questions. Sample topics from previous semesters include:

• “Writing and the Environment: Composition Studies as “Fertile Ground” for the Promotion of Sustainability”
• “How did the ‘Canon Debates’ shape an English Major”
• “Dante and the Heroic Past”
• “Gender and Mental Illness in The Bell Jar”
• “Muckrakers and McClures“
• “From Manuscript to Publication: Maxwell Perkins’ Contributions to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises”
• “Can We Really Remove Political Bias? A Meta-Criticism of Mainstream Media Bias”
• “The Painting” (a short story)
• “ Reconsidering Writing Fellow Programs in Relation to the Writing Center”

Honors theses are year-long independent research or creative projects where seniors, mentored by three faculty experts, engage with and contribute to scholarship in literary and writing studies or produce their own substantial creative work. Examples include:

• The Representations, Reception and Reputation of Jane Austen in Women’s Literary Culture
• Oscar Wilde’s Theory of Criticism: ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Decay of Lying’
• Wright and Ellison: Icons of African American Protest Literature Casting the crisis : representations of gay men’s identities and their gendering in New York’s AIDS Literature
• The Aran Islander in the Late Irish Literary Renaissance: An Ecocritical Reading
• Queer Negativity and Utopianism in Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence
• Solitude, Spinsterhood, and ‘single blessedness’: Charlotte Bronte and Redundant Women in Nineteenth-Century Protestant England
• The Construction of Masculinity in Post-9/11 Literary Narratives”
• “This is London”: The Politics of (Im)mobility in Spatial Theory and British Migrant Literature
• Ladies in Log Cabins: Understanding National Identity and Tensions in Antebellum America through Female-Authored Responses to Reckless Individualism

Advanced students have the option, in close consultation with a faculty member, to design an independent course of study on a topic of interest related to literary or writing studies and creative writing. Examples include:

• Film Theory
• Contemporary Essays by Women
• Science Writing
• Travel Writing
• Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Women Writers
• The Rhetoric of Grant Writing: finding, assessing, and writing grants
• The Victorian Language of Flowers

Other independent study topics have included:

• Authorship studies
• Screenwriting
• Tutoring and teaching writing
• Theories of editing
• Creative writing projects

At any point in their college careers, students have the opportunity to work as paid research assistants for faculty members within the English department. These positions give students valuable real life experience– by honing their professional communication and information literacy skills–that may lead to the discovery of new areas of scholarly interest.