What CAN'T you do with an English major?
The English major develops essential skills—adept written and oral communication,
critical and creative thinking, intellectual curiosity, understanding of diversity—that
all employers highly value. Our majors have gone on to successful careers in everything
from law, business, advertising, publishing, teaching, and advocacy, to medicine and
public health.
English Major
Learn more about courses and requirements for an English major, including information
about the Honors seminar
English Minor
Learn more about enriching your communications, business, psychology, or science major
with a minor in English
Interdisciplinary Options
Combine fields of study to forge your own path. Options include double and split majors,
split interdisciplinary majors, interdisciplinary minors, and the McCauley Scholars
Program
Research Opportunities
Learn more about grants and funded opportunities for English students
Where Will Your Degree Take You?
An English degree provides you with essential skills like oral and written communication, critical thinking, creativity, and cultural knowledge that will help you stand out in today’s competitive job market. Learn more about how you can use your degree.
Alumni Highlights
Real Skills, Real Impact
English and a Career in Law
Featured Courses
Radicals & Pretenders: Bohemianism in Modern Literature
This course immerses you in the history and philosophy of bohemianism to understand
the nature of their rebellions. Are bohemians really radicals or just pretenders?
Comic Books as Literature, TV & Cinema
A course that exposes students to the impact of comic books, graphic novels, and manga
on popular culture and teaches them how to discuss this medium academically.
The Black Arts Movement
This course discusses The Black Arts Movement; described as the “aesthetic and spiritual
sister of the Black Power Movement,” which sowed the seeds of revolution in the sense
of the word—written, spoken, and drawn.
Shakespeare: History and Tragedies
A course that focuses on Shakespeare’s history plays, where that world is first defined
and his mature tragedies where it finds its finest expression.
Black Lit Matters
A course that traces the art and authority of the African American literary tradition
from the 18th to the 21st century.
English Literature: Monsters and the Monstrous
This course examines the intersections of science, technology, and the monstrous in
the 19th‐ and early 20th‐centuries and examines the fears that scientific theorizing
and experimentation unleashed, revealing themselves in "monster" literature.
Victorian Crime, Mystery, and Detection
A course exploring crime and mystery fiction, and beyond while exploring urban population
growth, the evolution of the police force and crime-fighting methods, and changes
in theory and practice involving punishment.
Writing Back: Revisiting the Classics
This course explores classic, canonical literary texts compared to their modern rewritings,
in which a later author borrows the characters or narrative from a previous text and
rewrites it from a different, more progressive angle.
Literature of the U.S.-Mexico Border
This course explores the literature of Chicanx authors writing about the culture of
the borderland, from the violent creation of the US-Mexico border in 1848 to the present
day.