Why English?

Welcome to the Department of English. Elsewhere on this site, you’ll find a description of the major, a list of our faculty and our courses, a calendar of our events. This page is the place where our majors speak for themselves, about the many ways they navigate coursework and independent work and the work that comes after. Pathways is a series of portraits of majors talking about their careers inside McCosh Hall, how they shaped the department’s wide offerings into a program of their own. Futures gives a view of what comes next, the many possibilities for work and life that open out from the study of literature, language, and culture. Our graduates are doctors, lawyers, activists, professors—all of them equipped with critical tools for analysis and interpretation, all of them carrying a mental library of great books, books to think with all their lives.