George Mason University

In May 2006, five faculty members from the English department—John Burt Foster, Jr., Amal Amireh, Tamara Harvey, Alok Yadav (pictured here) and Joel Foreman (who has recently retired)—ran an NEH-funded workshop on the teaching of world literature. The workshop included participants from six other universities, as well as other participants from Mason, and brought in five experts in literatures of different world regions: East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The project was used to develop a series of different English 201 classes addressing world literature while attending to the general education mandate of this course. This project was part of the English department’s wider embrace of literature and other cultural texts in relation to a global horizon, as exemplified in upper division courses on subjects like Postcolonial Poetry, Representing Islam, The Idea of a World Literature, African Fiction, Translating Poetry, Folklore of the Borderlands, World Cinema, Continental Novels in Translation, and Global Voices.