English Department
An Education in Imaginative Reasoning
The Baylor English department is a diverse community of faculty, staff, undergraduate students, and graduate students who share a love for language. We’re interested in what language can tell us about who we are as people and how it can help us be agents of good in the world. We divide our research and courses into three main categories: Literature, Linguistics, and Professional Writing and Rhetoric. Enjoy learning more about us from our website!
Undergraduate
Literature, Linguistics, and Professional Writing and Rhetoric
We love our English undergraduates! We offer majors in English Literature, Linguistics, or Professional Writing and Rhetoric. We also offer a minor in Creative Writing. Our students work with top scholars in their fields and benefit from small, discussion-oriented classes. They also enjoy opportunities to test out possible careers, whether through internships or as staff members of The Phoenix, the department’s student-run magazine.
Graduate
Why Study English?
We’re proud of our Ph.D. completion percentage and job placement rate and have been ranked best in the nation for Student Support and Outcomes by the National Research Council. Our graduate faculty offer the M.A. and Ph.D. in literary criticism as well as a certificate in literature and religion. Our graduates are both generalists who can teach a range of courses and specialists with significant books and articles.
Recent Faculty Publications
All Publications
A study of the racist mythologies employed in science, religion, law, and culture by white Americans to justify slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/white-lies-9780197652183
This compelling collection of fourteen essays explores the enduring theme of exile in Shakespeare’s works and their global afterlives, offering a timely and thought-provoking response to the modern age of displacement. Building on Edward Said’s observation that exile today is marked by its unprecedented scale—driven by war, imperialism, totalitarianism, climate change, and systemic injustice—this volume traces the ideological and cultural forces that shape experiences of exile across time and geography.
Shakespeare’s plays, deeply haunted by exile in its many guises—political, religious, cultural, and gendered—serve as a rich site for interrogating identity, belonging, and otherness.
What Country, Friends, Is This?” Shakespeare and the Staging of Exile
Brings together two conversations in rhetoric and writing studies that have rarely been examined together: how writers transfer knowledge across context and how they compose across modes and media. Extending earlier work connecting multimodality to writing, this collection explores how writing transfer works across of range of multimodal composing contexts, including undergraduate and graduate courses, writing centers, and public writing.
University Press of Colorado - Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer
Too often, when women in literary texts come of age, they die. Instead of entering an adulthood full of possibility, female characters time and again follow the path charted by Ophelia and drown, either literally in waters they cannot navigate or metaphorically in a society that does not allow them to construct their own stories.
Eudora Welty, however, rewrites this standard female coming-of-age story by repeating a specific key scene. More than a dozen times in her narratives, a young woman encounters a body of water—a lake, a river, a whirlpool, or even a rain barrel. In every case, the character’s submersion signals her entry into an adulthood full of possible danger. When the submersion experience becomes a spiritual baptism, however, the enchanted natural world can empower female characters to counter human social structures that tend to leave them silent, ignored, or dead.
Of Women and Water | University Press of Mississippi
Introducing their Positive Language Education framework, the authors expertly outline the theoretical background for integrating linguistic objectives with a wide range of holistic 21st century competencies including emotional regulation, well-being, ecoliteracy, and global citizenship.
This book contributes to a sparsely studied but significant entanglement: the ways in which Shakespeare informs Latinx artistic and cultural production and Latinx young adult literature informs Shakespeare. The book demonstrates how Shakespeare is repurposed by Latinx writers of young adult literature to critique oppressive social and educational structure and, from that, to imagine more socially just and culturally sustaining futures.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-63010-1
This book introduces the Bible as one of the greatest works of world literature. Luke Ferretter provides a comprehensive history of the field, alongside detailed readings of the texts of the Bible and the most influential theories in the area.
Routledge - 2025
Twin sisters team up—despite drastically different personalities—to save their family from a bitter witch’s curse in this rich and atmospheric middle grade novel. Holiday House - May 2025
Tracing the origins of how we think about strangers to the Victorian period, Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830– 1865 explores the vital role strangers had in shaping social relations during the cultural transformations of the Industrial Revolution, transportation technologies, and globalization. Routledge - Jan 2025
An anthology of Lake District poetry.
Waterland Books Jan 2025