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. We are eager to guide your inspirations and to enrich your experiences as emerging readers and writers. In our department, you will feel at once welcomed and challenged—starting with the friendliness of our faculty, staff, and students and stretching to the adventures in ideas that 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: our department has been named one of the top ten for writers by College Magazine and sixth in the nation by USA Today for the training of undergraduate authors. Such recognition testifies to the tradition of collaboration in our department, where we share our experience of what literature can do to foster an imaginative grasp of the reality of others and to enhance the ability to persuade, inspire, and lead.