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
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
At the Garden’s Dark Edge is a collection of a hundred of Thwaite’s poems, selected from a span of more than sixty years, exploring his major themes and recurring topics--among them, the consolations of domestic life, the pleasures of language and creativity, and the many humans and other animals in his life. Baylor University Press - Dec 2024