Department of English

Greetings from the English Department!

We are a multi-faceted department housed in Helen C. White Hall overlooking beautiful Lake Mendota—sailboats and hot air balloons in the summer and ice fishers in the winter. With about 55 faculty, 33 academic staff, 800 majors, and 200 graduate students, we are one of the largest and most distinguished departments in the College of Letters and Science.

The department fosters an open dialogue about issues and methods in the study of literatures, writing, and language in English across the globe. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches and incorporate the study of culture, theory, and history into our research and curricula. Many faculty and students participate in departmental interest areas, groups such as the Contemporary Literature Colloquium, the Minority Studies Reading Group, the Middle Modernity Study Group, the American Studies group, the Beowulf Club, the Gender Studies group, and the Renaissance Colloquium. Some fourteen faculty have joint appointments with African Languages and Literatures, Afro-American Studies, American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and Women's Studies. Many others affiliate with campus programs and clusters such as the African Diaspora, African Studies, Cultural Studies in Global Context, Ethnic Studies, and Jewish Studies. The Department also houses publications including the scholarly journal Contemporary Literature and The Madison Review.

Offering BA/BS Major, MA, and PhD degrees, the department's largest program is in Literary Studies, which covers the full range of historical periods and literatures in English in Britain, the Americas, and the Anglophone world. The Bridge Program with Afro-American Studies encourages graduate students to combine an MA in Afro-American Studies with a PhD in English. The Creative Writing Program offers a major and an MFA degree in fiction or poetry, runs a stimulating readers series, edits the Madison Review, and sponsors a number of writing prizes. The Ph.D. Program in Composition and Rhetoric Program is an interdisciplinary program focusing on rhetoric, literacy, language and learning, discourse, and pedagogy. The English Language and Linguistics program includes a linguistics track in the undergraduate English major, a Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) Certificate, an MA in Applied English Linguistics and PhD in English Language and Linguistics.

The Writing Center provides a vast array of services across the campus, including tutorials, module non-credit courses, web services and computer classrooms, the Writing Across the Curriculum program, and the Writing Fellows program. The English as a Second Language Program teaches some 1,500 international students a year, helping to support the campus's commitment to linking the University to all parts of the world. We are also the proud home to the world-famous Dictionary of American Regional English. The English Department is also proud to sponsor the UW Odyssey Project, a free college humanities course for adults facing economic barriers to higher education.

(rev. 8/2008)