Department of English

Learning and Research

Undergraduate Program

Undergraduates who major or minor in English explore literature as readers and writers in small classes that focus on the individual student. With help from our wide array of course topics and intellectual approaches, alumni of the English department have succeeded in top-notch graduate programs in law, business and medicine as well as in English and creative writing.

Learn about our Undergraduate Program

Teaching and Research

Graduate Studies

The department is home to one of the best and most generously funded English PhD programs in North America. It is dedicated to training superb scholars and well-rounded teachers of literature able to meet the expectations of the challenging academic job market and to pursue rewarding alternative careers.

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Critical Thinking & Innovation

The Critic as Artist/The Artist as Critic

The department of English has launched a two-year Hurst initiative to encourage collegial conversations about the making and judgment of the literary arts.

Our Community

We are a community of readers and writers, scholars and teachers. We range across the literatures of English in space as well as time, combining global diversity with broad historical coverage. This resource opens for you as students under the guidance of faculty who are committed to their roles as teachers and mentors. In our department, you will feel at once welcomed and challenged—starting with the openness of our faculty, staff, and students and stretching to the novel encounters with language your peers and instructors will help to spark.

About our Department

English is one of the most storied departments in the College of Arts & Sciences. Our recent history includes two U.S. Poet Laureates and multiple National Book Award winners as well as noted scholars in many fields of literary history. Our accomplishments as a faculty become an invitation, for you as students, to reach the level of excellence you expect of yourselves, whether in the form of a national award or an essay or poem well written. We have been recognized as exceptional in this respect: USA Today has ranked us as the sixth-best home in the nation for undergraduate authors, while College Magazine has placed us at number eight. Such recognition testifies to the tradition of collaboration in our department, where we share the experience of literature’s power to enlighten, inspire, challenge, and lead.

The Spectacle

The first issue of The Spectacle was launched in the fall of 2015, with Kelly Caldwell, Cassie Donish, and Jonathan McGregor at the helm. Twice a year, the magazine publishes issues that include poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art, while THE REVUE publishes flash prose, short poems, interviews, special features, and other pieces year-round.

We aim for content that reminds us that our lenses matter—they focus, distort, clarify, conceal. We value and emphasize relationships between the literary and visual arts, pairing the majority of the pieces we publish with original work from a variety of contributing visual artists.

Based in the English, Creative Writing, and Visual Art programs at Washington University in St. Louis, The Spectacle is committed to publishing work from under-represented voices, including people of color, women, people from LGBTQIA+ communities, and people who have disabilities.

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Read our Current Issue

“To unpack and enjoy complex texts; to read with a critical eye; to write and communicate with concision and purpose -- these are skills invaluable to my pursuit of the law, my pursuit of meaning, and without them I would be lost.”

―Ryan Foreman BA, 2014

Recent News

'Born a slave, died a chef': WU professor writes about role of food in search for civil rights

Rafia Zafar discusses her new book in the St. Louis Post Dispatch

Carl Phillips wins LA Times Book Prize

Carl Phillips was named the winner of the LA Times Book Prize for poetry for his book Wild is the Wind

Career Opportunities

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS, Department of English, Assistant or Associate Professor. The Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis invites applications for a tenured or tenure-track position in post-1945 American Literature, including Asian-American and/or Latinx and/or Native American literatures. The position would begin in the fall semester of 2020. Duties include teaching, conducting research, writing for publication, advising students, participating in departmental governance and university service. Application materials—a letter of interest, a CV, and a description of a current book project— should be submitted to the Washington University online application system, https://jobs.wustl.edu, using job listing number 45365. Letters of reference, teaching statements, and writing samples are not required at this time; Skype interviews of selected candidates will occur in November and December, and finalists will have on-campus visits subsequently. Applications received before 25 October 2019 will receive priority consideration.