The Department of English
Where words become your superpower. Master the art of communication and critical thinking that shapes leaders, drives democracy and transforms ideas into impact across every field.
What is English?
English is your gateway to mastering the most essential skills for success in our information-driven world — communication, critical thinking and creative expression that open doors across every industry and profession. Our department empowers you to become a versatile leader equipped with the analytical writing, research excellence and independent thinking that employers consistently seek and democratic societies require.
Whether you're drawn to creative writing, literary scholarship or professional communication, you'll explore literature's power to illuminate human experience while developing practical skills through our Professional Public Writing track and hands-on opportunities like the award-winning Miracle Monocle literary journal. Here, your passion for language and storytelling evolves into the expertise and leadership that drives innovation, fosters understanding and creates meaningful change in communities and organizations worldwide.
Explore Your Future
Amplify Your Voice
Why Study English?
Workers in the U.S. hold English degrees
Projected employment growth for postsecondary teachers
Median annual wage for media & communication workers
Recent News from English
Creative Writing Group: Writing in New Genres
Creative Writing Group: Coalition of Advanced Writers
Axton Reading Series Presents Nikki Wallschlaeger
My focus on English language and literature gave me many of the tools I need to be a sensitive and curious writing instructor, interviewer, and editor
Career Prospects
Where Words Become Your Advantage
An English degree gives you more than literary knowledge and writing ability — it gives you the analytical, rhetorical and critical thinking skills that employers across every sector consistently identify as their most essential needs. Whether your path leads to publishing, law, marketing, education, nonprofit work, technology or creative practice, your training in how language works and what it can do travels with you everywhere.
English graduates are among the most versatile in the workforce. Our graduates work across journalism, communications, business, public service, education, law and emerging digital fields — and many forge careers that combine more than one of these areas. The skills you build here — reading carefully, writing persuasively, arguing clearly and thinking independently — are the skills that make organizations function and cultures move forward.
You'll graduate with a portfolio of written work, real critical thinking practice and the flexible expertise that makes an English degree one of the most widely distributed credentials in the American workforce. Our graduates turn their command of language into careers that lead, inform and shape the world.
Master the Ultimate Transferable Skill
Ready to join the graduates who turn words into winning careers? In a world driven by information and connection, your voice becomes your superpower.