The English department secured a gift of $700,000 earlier today, one of the largest single donations to a humanities department in GW history.

Jeffrey Cohen, the English department chair, said the donation will fund high profile visiting professors starting with Pulitzer Prize winning author Edward P. Jones in the fall of 2009.

“We’re really excited about this,” Cohen said. “I can’t recall a bigger donation in the humanities. We’ve been doing everything on a shoestring for a long time but this is the funding we’ve been working for.”

The gift was donated by the Wang family, which includes twin sisters who will be sophomores in the fall. Cohen said $300,000 of the gift will establish and fund the Wang Visiting Professor in Contemporary English Literature over the next two years. The other $400,000 will be put toward a permanent endowment.

“This means we are raising the profile of the humanities at GW,” Cohen said. “Edward Jones will be an incredibly valuable addition during his stay.”

Cohen said he and five other English department members closed the deal with Jones at a lunch earlier today. Jones, who penned the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Known World, will teach a creative writing course and hold a special literature class, which Cohen described as “a sort of book club,” during his stay at GW.

Cohen said GW’s District location was a factor in securing Jones as a professor.

“He lives over on Massachusetts Ave.,” Jones said. “The fact that he could teach somewhere nearby was important to him. He’s an author, not a professor, so we’re lucky to have him.”