English Department
- BA in General English
- BA in English Education
- BA in Linguistics
- Minor in CreativeWriting
- Minor in English
- Minor in Linguistics
- Certificate in Literary Editing and Publishing
- Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
- Honors Program
- English as a Foreign Language
Major Academic Plans (MAPs)
Graduate ProgramsWelcome
Why do students choose an English major? For the many things we study: language, ideas, and theories. We are really six overlapping sub-divisions under one umbrella—the English Department. We study literature, composition and rhetoric, linguistics, editing and publishing, English education, and creative writing.
What can you do with an English degree? Many things. Our graduates work as teachers (elementary through university, in the U.S. and overseas), editors, publishers, writers for television and movies, software publishers, lawyers, doctors, bankers—the list goes on and on.
Whatever combination of our six disciplines you choose to focus on, we'll help you develop communication skills, written and oral. And those skills will open many doors for you.
For more information about our programs, follow the links below, and feel free to stop by the department office in Taylor 209 any time.
What We Do in English
- Creative Writing
- English Education
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Literary Editing and Publishing
- Rhetoric and Composition
Literature
Our work together is a focused reading, discussing, and writing about novels and short stories, poems, and plays. Since literary art, like other arts, seeks to provide its audience with pleasures and delights, this excitement and intensifying of feelings is our first concern. We offer courses covering literature from a vast range of time periods and cultures; and to help you have as rich an experience as possible, teachers often led you to explore historical, philosophical, psychological, political, religious, and social backgrounds from which the writers in hand emerge. Beyond ushering you into new settings of pleasure, we hope that reading and interacting with literature will enable all of us together to see how we could think and feel other than as we do. Then we might better be able to understand ourselves by attending to the differences between how we typically feel and how other people feel and have felt. This relentless attentiveness may lead us into altered but not diminished capacities to experience deeply and gratefully what arises as new, different, and even challenging in our lives.