Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature
Hamilton Holmes Professor
Distinguished Research Professor
Associate Professor
Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor
Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing
Eidson Professor LeAnne Howe’s work on the Sharing Lands: Reconciliation, Recognition, & Reciprocity continues.
The remarkable story of the $172 sent by members of the Choctaw tribe to the starving in Ireland during the Great Famine in 1847 is often told. Despite that fact, both the details surrounding the connection between the Choctaw Nation and the people of Ireland and the gift’s legacy has been greatly understudied. This project will address that gap and will be a transdisciplinary and transatlantic study of the enduring relationship between the Choctaw Nation and Ireland.
The ‘Sharing Lands’ project team consists of Dr Padraig Kirwan, Professor LeAnne Howe and Professor Gillian O’Brien. The team are internationally recognised experts in the fields of Indigenous Studies, Literary Studies, Irish Famine Studies and Public History.
Associate Professor Aruni Kashyap's American market debut How to Date a Fanatic, will be published by HarperVia in 2026! Additionally, Kashyap’s story collection, The Way You Want To Be Loved was published by Gaudy Boy Press in October. Kashyap's translation of Anuradha Sarma Pujari’s best-selling Assamese novel My Poems Are Not for Your Ad-Campaign was shortlisted for the 2024 Valley of Words Book Awards. He translated and sold another book by Pujari, Ten Love Stories & a Novella of Despair, to Westland Books, due for publication in 2026. He is a visiting professor at Converse University, South Carolina, in January 2025 and an invited speaker at the College of William & Mary in March 2025 and at the University of Texas at Dallas in April 2025.
Chigozie Obioma’s new novel, The Road to the Country, was named as a best fiction book of the year by The Economist and The Kirkus Review. It was also named one of the books on the longlist for the Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize for 2025 and longlisted for the 2025 Nigeria Prize for Literature.
Andrew Zawacki recently completed a yearlong fellowship in the Long Term Photobook Program at the Penumbra Foundation. Last fall, he participated in a colloquium at Université Paris Cité devoted to the work of Anne Portugal, whose latest poetry book, s&lfies, he's currently translating. As judge of the Georgia Poetry Prize, he selected Michael James Walsh’s A Season for publication by UGA Press. This spring, Dr. Zawacki spent a week in upstate New York as the Sandra Nelson Visiting Poet at St. Lawrence University. His newest chapbook, Noise for A Landscape, was just published by Sixth Finch, while his sixth full-length poetry volume, These Late Eclipses, is due any day now from Verge. Dr. Zawacki's ENDSCAPE was selected for an inaugural series mixing poetry and photography, The P5 Photo Poetry Pamphlet, directed by Photoworks in partnership with David Solo and designed by Jane & Jeremy.
This past year Magdalena Zurawski continued working on related nonfiction and translation projects that emerged during her research in Poland as a Fulbright Scholar. A selection of her translations of Miron Białozsewski’s prose appeared in the fall issue of Michigan Quarterly Review, and she presented and discussed a selection of her nonfiction project on poet Julie Carr’s podcast Return the Key. In the spring, she was awarded a fellowship to the MacDowell Artist Residency program, where she spent a month writing this summer.