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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. For those who choose to Major in English, we offer concentrations in Creative Writing and Publishing. 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.

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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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A Statement from the Department of English

In the wake of the slaying of George Floyd, and of so many African Americans before him, the department of English at Washington University in St. Louis maintains that Black books and Black Lives Matter. Current circumstance also compels us...

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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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“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
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Recent News

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