Like everyone else in Higher Education, we’re thinking about AI. Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini promise to reinvent the way we think, research, and write. And whether you’re a current or a former English major at Lehigh, you know that thinking, researching, and writing is what we do best. We’re not anti-technology here in Drown Hall—indeed, Professor Renée Bailey chaired a panel on AI and writing at the annual convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association in March 2025—but we are concerned that AI might be making it more difficult for our students not only to develop the skills that will help them to perform well in a wide variety of careers, but also to cultivate the habits of mind that are the hallmark of a humanities education.
Lehigh students share these concerns as well. In a recent editorial for The Brown and White titled “Robots are taking over the world, we get it,” student journalists encourage us to remember that writing is one of the most fundamentally human activities that we engage in. “At some point,” they write, “we need to see that although artificial intelligence can string words together, it can’t truly write — not in the raw, beautiful way humans can. It’s never labored over a draft until its ideas came alive.”
As faculty in the English Department, we take particular pride in watching our students bring their ideas to life. Just last April, we celebrated ten of our graduating seniors who went above and beyond the requirements of the English major to write an honors or creative thesis as part of a year-long writing experience that paired them with a faculty mentor as they produced a substantive work of scholarship or short fiction.
- Under the guidance of Creative Writing Professor Stephanie Watts, Trinity Price wrote "Love Will Remain," Jonah Willett wrote "The Reaper of Death," and Ruben Gomez produced a series of short stories.
- Professor Lyndon Dominique oversaw Bella Etkin’s “Imagination and Emotional Agency: Empowering Young Girls through Peter Pan” and Bridget Martin’s "Two Sides of the Same Coin: Colonialism, Neocolonialism, and Reproduction in The Hunger Games and Mockingjay."
- Professor Edward Whitley worked with Gianna Sottile on "New Body Politics: The Power of Controlling Images, Race, and Sexuality in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God" and with Jonathan Bennett on "Romanticism Simulator: Exploring Minecraft through the Lens of Romanticism."
- Theodora Chacharone’s thesis “Different & Disadvantaged: The Social Model of Disability in Shakespeare's The Tempest” was directed by Professor Kate Crassons; Abigail Trainor’s “Piercing through Patriarchy and Imagining a Better Future in Woman on the Edge of Time” was directed by Professor Mary Foltz; and Sarah Joseph’s “The Once and Future Queen: Morgan le Fay and the Power of Feminist Reimagination" was directed by Professor Emily Weissbourd.
We also celebrated four graduate students who completed an MA thesis or PhD dissertation.
- Sarah Thompson (MA), “The (Non)Human Collapse: Evolution and Survival in Folk Horror” (directed by Professor Dawn Keetley)
- Randi Hogden (MA), “Nonpersons in Nikan: Violence & Vengeance in R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War” (directed by Professor Mary Foltz)
- Colby Roberston (MA), “Dissecting the Korean Nationalist Allegory of Masculinity: A Comparative Study of Crash Landing on You and My Demon” (directed by Professor Emily Weissbourd)
- Elizabeth Erwin (PhD), “When the Woman Screams: Female Horror Screams as a Reclamation of Space, Agency, and Monstrosity” (directed by Professor Dawn Keetley)
English Department faculty members have also made an impact with their own research and writing this year.
- Professor Scott Gordon recently won the Pennsylvania Historical Association’s 2025 Klein Prize for his article, “A Moravian Rifle Goes to War: Disarming and Arming Pennsylvanians, 1775-1776,” which was published in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies in 2023.
- Professor Mary Foltz received a prestigious grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for her project "Exploring Pennsylvania’s Recent Legislative History and Its Impact on LGBTQ+ People."
- Professor Michael Kramp has been traveling the globe interviewing Jane Austen scholars for his podcast and forthcoming documentary film celebrating the 250th birthday of the author of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility.
This year we also welcome a new faculty member to our department with expertise in the area of writing studies. Professor Zakery Muñoz recently earned his PhD in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric from Syracuse University, and has already published his research in the premier academic journal in his field. His essay, “Our Responsibility to Graduate Student Writers,” appeared in College Composition and Communication in 2024. Professor Muñoz will also be teaching Lehigh’s first “Writing with AI” course during the Spring 2026 semester. We’re eager to see what Professor Muñoz learns from working with his students on the pros and cons of inviting AI into the writing classroom. Faculty in the Lehigh English Department have always been invested in helping students to understand how new technologies can help—or hinder—our development as thinkers, researchers, and writers. We share the assessment of the Brown and White editorial board that “the goal of academia . . . is to preserve human voices,” and as such we look forward to hearing what our students have to tell us in class discussions and written assignments alike. Their human intelligence continues to impress us year after year.
Edward Whitley, Professor and Chair
October 2025