Meet Abby Brown, who is currently a 2025-2026 Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry! Abby is writing her honors thesis in non-fiction through the English and Creative Writing program. Here’s what she had to say:
“My project aims to illuminate the impacts of the death penalty and the larger carceral state on individuals with loved ones formerly executed or currently incarcerated. While I have personal convictions against the death penalty, my thesis is not argumentative. My goal is to convey these individuals’ unique experiences as honestly as possible. I have been interviewing mothers, pen pals, friends, activists, and others invested in death penalty work. My fellowship through the Fox Center has allowed me to bounce ideas off peers pursuing humanities theses. Conversations with my fellow fellows have been interesting, as all of our projects and fields of study are wildly different. My main takeaway from the fellowship thus far has been the value of trial and error. Hearing my peers share different iterations their ideas have gone through has helped me recognize the value of an adaptable mindset, especially during the thesis process.”
Renowned for his work on Georgia Civil Rights cold cases and his WABE series “Buried Truths,” Pulitzer-Prize winner and journalist Hank Klibanoff’s teaching is showcased in Emory Report.
Congratulations to Ghazala Hashmi on an incredible accomplishment!
She has just been elected as Virginia’s lieutenant governor! Hashmi earned her doctorate in Emory’s English department in 1992 with a dissertation titled William Carlos Williams and the American ground of “In the American Grain” and “Paterson.” Her advisor was Prof. Peter Dowell.
Most recently, she was elected to the Virginia Senate in 2019 and was then reelected in 2023.
Well done, Ghazala!
Photo:HashmiCampaign – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149290578
Congratulations to Cameron Hart on an impressive year!
Cameron, a junior English major from Memphis, was one of just 15 students selected to study at the inaugural Folger Institute Undergraduate Spring Seminar, 2025. The program, titled “Whose Sovereignty?,” was led by Professor of English Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto) and explored power and consent across political, social, sexual, racial, and economic spheres. Throughout the spring semester, Cameron engaged with modern and early contemporary texts, spoke with guest scholars, and visited the Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Her final seminar project was a podcast in collaboration with three peers from other institutions that reflected on the experience.
Last fall, Cameron was also admitted to Emory’s Scholarly Inquiry and Research Experience (SIRE) Program, a year-long program for first-time undergraduate researchers. As an assistant to Professor Patricia Cahill throughout the academic year, Cameron helped prepare an edition of Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI, advanced databases and web platforms with the support of library staff, and worked on an independent research project. Cameron presented her research at the SIRE Symposium at the Emory Student Center in April 2025, exploring topics from the Popish Plot to a modern production of Shakespeare’s history plays staged on actual British battlefields.
Cameron plans to continue studying early modern literature and is especially interested in Shakespearean adaptations during the Restoration. After graduating from Emory, she hopes to pursue a PhD in English and is excited to see how her research interests continue to evolve. Well done, Cameron! –Contributions by Pat Cahill and Safa Wahidi
Congratulations to 2018 Ph.D. alum Richie Hofmann, who has been awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2025 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous collections, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and his latest, The Bronze Arms will be published in February 2026. His work has also appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review. His honors include the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.
This summer, Emory partnered with Plympton, a San Francisco-based literary studio that focuses on innovation in publishing, to offer paid internships to thirteen students, most of them English majors. Plympton works across a range of practices, from story format to book cover design to library licenses to writer compensation. It is also building a database of short stories, called the Writing Atlas, which includes rich information about each story, such as plot summaries and reader annotations, to help understand why some stories have been successful and how some might also be successful as TV or film adaptations. It aspires to be the world’s most comprehensive database of short stories.
Emory student interns each read approximately one hundred and twenty short stories this summer, most from the history of the Best American Short Story series, and prepared accounts of them for the Writing Atlas. In addition, they had opportunities to meet with industry professionals. Each week, Plympton hosted figures working in a range of positions to speak with and take questions from the interns, which allowed them to explore possible careers. Finally, Plympton invited interns to share their particular passions and helped them find special projects to take on, which included working with adaptation rights from literature to film, designing ebook covers, and writing treatments of novels for Hollywood producers.
The Department of English is delighted to spotlight Ananya Mohan’s participation in the internship, read her reflections below!
Ananya Mohan English Major Emory University, Class of 2024
Remote internships can seem like a necessity enforced by the pandemic – complicated to execute and difficult to participate in – but my experience with the Emory-Plympton internship was anything but. The primary objective was to work on the Writing Atlas, which is a database storing information on American short stories going back several decades. By itself, this was engaging work – being exposed to the variety within the sub-genre and working with stories that overlap in interesting ways with other fields of study.
However, the best part of this internship was the extra value that it offered by way of weekly speaker sessions. These meetings allowed interns to connect with people who have been working in the publishing industry for many years, who offered advice and insight into the realities of the job. The main thing that I took away from this internship is the real-world applicability of an English major, especially since Plympton supplemented their speaker meetings by giving interns the opportunity to work on their other projects as well.
Overall, this was an experience that I really enjoyed. The environment was welcoming, the hours were more than reasonable, and even though it was remote, it felt well-connected. I hope Emory carries this forward in the coming years!
