English Major

Department Advanced Placement Policy

Students with AP credit in English are not awarded credit in the major or advanced placement in the English curriculum.

Requirements

Required courses
Poetry and Poetics
Touchstones 1: Early Brit Lit
Touchstones 2A: American Lit
Touchstones 2B: Brit&Anglo Lit
Select eight advanced courses, including requirements in the following categories: 1, 2
Group A (Pre-1800):
Two courses, each from a different period among medieval, Renaissance, 18th-century, and Early American historical periods.
Medieval period
Medieval Romance
Chaucer
Sex & Gender in Middle Ages
Renaissance period
Age of Elizabeth
Milton
Shakespeare
18th century period
Milton
Georgic and Pastoral
18th-Century Novel
18th-Century Poetry
18th-Century Satire
Restoration & 18th-Century Drama
British Women Writers 1770 - 1860 (Early American Period)
Early American Period
Early American Colonialism
Group B (19th Century):
One course from the 19th-century British or 19th-century American historical periods.
The Romantic Revolution
British Women Writers 1770 - 1860
Victorian Poetry
19th-Century British Novel
Reality Hunger
Thoreau: Then and Now
American Realism
American Women Write the World
Lincoln, Civil War, & Memory
Poe's Haunted Poetry
African American Literature
Environmental Poetics
Group C (Marginalized Voices):
One course. Includes all courses focusing on traditionally marginalized groups.
African American Literature
British Women Writers 1770 - 1860
American Women Write the World
American Immigrant Narratives
Latinx Literature
Contemporary African American Literature and Culture
Asian American Literature
21st-Century Literature
Confrontations with Christianity
Queer Theory
Feminist Literary Theory
Group D (Theories and Methodologies):
One course. Includes all seminars and all courses that offer a sustained methodological or theoretical consideration of the study of literature or language.
Ekphrasis
The United States of Poetry
Environmental Poetics
Rhetoric
Queer Theory
Feminist Literary Theory
Composition Theory & Pedagogy
Seminar
Additional advanced courses:
Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry
Introduction to Creative Writing: Narrative
Intermediate Academic Writing
Intermediate Poetry Workshop
Intermediate Fiction Workshop
Intermediate Creative Nonfiction Workshop
Tales of American Experiences
T.S. Eliot
Joyce
Contemporary Irish Literature
Modern British Novel
Modern Drama
Adv Creative Writing Workshop

Advanced courses can simultaneously fulfill any of these four groups. That is, “double-dipping” or “triple-dipping” is allowed (e.g. a seminar on “Gender in the Renaissance” could conceivably fulfill Groups A, C, and D at the same time). The remaining courses required for the major may include any 300- or 400-level English Department literature courses, courses approved for Study Abroad, and tutorials and honors theses devoted to British, American, or world Anglophone literature.

If the student is in the Teacher Certification Program, which requires a full semester during senior year, it is necessary to take all of the requirements for the major by the end of the first term of the senior year.

Study Abroad: Students who study abroad for the whole of their third year may transfer a maximum of four courses’ worth of credit toward the English major, with the exception that students studying at Oxford University or Trinity College, Dublin may transfer five courses’ worth of credit toward the major. Students who study abroad for one semester may transfer a maximum of two courses' worth of credit toward the English major.