The B.A. Major in English provides majors with marketable skills in writing, text analysis, and critical thinking and allows them to explore the power of the English language in all its historical, persuasive, and expressive range. Requirements for the English major provide in-depth training in literary history and culture. Majors take courses in all periods of British and American literature, as well as more recent periods of ethnic and contemporary world literature.
In addition to core requirements, students choose from an array of elective options in genre (poetry, fiction, and drama), media studies, popular culture, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, rhetoric, creative writing, and public and professional writing. In the department, majors can work with novelists and lexicographers, biographers and poets, rhetoricians and bloggers, experts in everything from medievalism to modernity, from nature writing to digital gaming, from Jonathan Swift to Taylor Swift.