Our Crowdfunding Groups
Anchored in the long history of the humanities, physical books continue to define the reading experience in Literature and other courses offered in the department. While digital textbooks are great for some disciplines, actual paper books continue to be essential to us. Many digital versions of books that EML teaches strip out key formatting—for instance, facing page translations that do not present the two languages on separate pages, poetry run together as prose, and garbled critical editions, with critical apparatus such as bibliographies not easily accessible.
The EML Lending Library is a library of books used commonly in EML classes—from Hualde’s Introducción a la lingüística hispánica, to the Riverside Shakespeare and the Norton Anthologies, to Albert Memí’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, to epic poems such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses or medieval texts like Beowulf (in facing page translation), to novels such as Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses.
Our classes also commonly require linguistics books, which tend to be expensive, as well as books on the writing process, academic writing guides, anthologies of critical and social theory, and other books useful to graduating seniors such as GRE and CSET prep guides.
Students check out books for the semester and return them at semester’s end—free of charge! 100 new books will ease the burden of textbook costs. For many students, textbooks are a major expense, and this initiative increases equity by giving all students equal access to books.
Testimonials
“We designed the Lending Library to remove a barrier for students’ success by supplying copies of commonly used textbooks in the department without fear of late fees or registration holds. In the first two years, we saved students around $2500.” –Aaron DeRosa, EML Professor
“The lending library in the EML department has provided my peers and I with a solution to expensive books. By allowing us to borrow the books assigned in our courses, it relieves the financial burden on many of us college students.” –Mona Hassanzadeh, EML Student
“The lending library puts print books in students’ hands, which helps with their enjoyment, comprehension, and retention of the text. When they come into a literature class, for instance, they need to have read and remembered the story for discussion and group work. When they read print, there are no ads or notifications--so fewer distractions, and that in addition to more concrete images of the text and the kinesthetic experience of turning the page all contribute to greater recall.” –Alison Baker, EML Professor
Satisfied Customer: Junior Andranik Hovsepian, an English Literary Studies major, borrowed Wolf & Wilder’s Digging Into Literature from the lending library in Fall 2023.
