Welcome to the English Department, where we study everything from medieval manuscripts to the latest memes.
Our students are experts at giving their lives meaning in words, and at interpreting the way that language is used as an artistic, rhetorical, and social medium. What unites us is the investigation of how the world changes when it is put into words.
A distinctive feature of the English Department is the highly personalized environment of our classes. In the dynamic exchange of our many discussion-based seminars, students’ voices and perspectives are central.
From day one, you are at the center of critical issues that resonate between the past and the present, unpacking crucial concepts such as identity, voice, expression, and opinion and testing out the myriad ways that individual lives and social concerns are defined, developed, and transformed through language.
The Department encompasses many forms of English:
- We offer an inclusive and dynamic vision of literary history relevant to our own time.
- We analyze rhetoric, looking at writing and other media as a way of pursing communicative means in various social and cultural contexts.
- We study the practices of teaching and assessing writing, including the social structure and meaning of English language learning.
- We use cutting-edge methods of data analysis to analyze texts and make archives available to new audiences.
- We practice writing in many forms, from the scholarly to the creative.
This year, we are conducting a series of events on the theme of Global Englishes. We will investigate the relationship of globalization and global literature to the structures of colonialism and imperialism and explore modes of English language and literature that are not centered in the Anglo-American context. We aim to foster a vision of English as a pluriversal field open to translingualism, diversity, and intersecting local, national, and transnational traditions.
Welcome to the discussion!
