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.
News
More NewsRegistration for the spring semester begins this week! Follow the link to check out the English Department's course offerings in the spring.
Dr. Ryan Sharp has been selected as one of twenty-eight Career Enhancement Fellows for the 2022-2023 academic year by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars! Congratulations, Dr. Sharp! Read more about Dr. Sharp and this exciting opportunity at the Baylor A&S blog post linked below.
Dr. Sebastian Langdell has been awarded a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities to be be used towards the completion of his second book, Thomas Hoccleve’s Collected Shorter Poems: A Critical Edition. This book is a critical edition of the first author-curated “collected poems” in the English language, now preserved in two complementary manuscripts in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, one of which was copied out by Hoccleve himself between 1422 and 1426.
In conjunction with the Beall Poetry Festival, Ginger Hanchey's class, "How Poetry Changes the World," created poetry installations on campus: writing lines of poetry on windows, chalking poetry on sidewalks, creating a walking trail with QR codes linking to poetry, tying tags with poems on bushes and plants in the garden next to ABL, and handing out stickers with images from poems - filling the campus with poetry.
Recent Faculty Publications
All Publications
An analysis of the literary strategies wielded by Black women during the oppressive Jim Crow years. University Press of Mississippi, 2022.
Analyzes profound implications of place in Friel’s five best-known and critically acclaimed plays. Syracuse University Press, 2022.
This anthology offers readers creative works by Texas writers as they wrestle with evolving systems of belief or nonbelief. Texas Christian University Press, 2022.
A collection of modern country house poems from over 160 distinguished poets. Liverpool University Press, 2021.
A critical examination of the role of property in gothic literature depicting slavery. University Press of Mississippi, 2020.