Department of English

The Department of English has six sub-units that form the basis of our teaching, research, and service agendas: creative writing; English education; film and media studies; linguistics and applied linguistics (which includes TESOL); literature; and writing, rhetorics and literacies.

Our mission is to study, create, and teach spoken, written, visual and digital communication practices and texts of every sort, ranging from the imaginative to those functioning in civic, social, personal, academic and professional communities, and to mentor others to do likewise.

The university’s general writing courses – offered by Arizona State Univertiy Writing Programs – are administered through the Department of English. Some 10,000 students in every major and discipline pass through these classes every semester.

We and our students are confronted with, and must learn to participate in, increasingly multilingual and polycommunicative practices. Toward that end – as we prepare the next generation of teachers, scholars, artists, and citizens – we create speculative work that advances new pathways of thought; analyze film and other media for greater appreciation and discernment; employ rhetorical knowledge to engage in social justice and community literacy projects; complete arts- and science-based studies of language and language-learning; and using literature, performance, and even virtual reality, reimagine basic concepts of what it means to be human.

Our strength is in the diversity of approaches we use to explore language, text and the peculiarities of the human condition. We are committed to boundary-shattering work, even while maintaining a rigorous historical curriculum. From digital to analog, oral to written, literary to filmic, concrete to imaginative, English studies presents an array of possibilities for exploration, inquiry and discovery.