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 NewsThe Martin Museum of Art collaborated with Dr. Jennifer Cognard-Black, the Robert Foster Cherry Professor for Great Teaching, and the students of PWR 3385 to present Word + Image: A Series of Ekphrastic Essays in Conversation with Art from the Martin Museum. Students have written essays in response to a work of art, and both the writings and chosen works will be on view May 11 - 23, 2021 in the Museum.
Dustin Stewart, alumnus of the Baylor English Department and assistant professor of English at Columbia University, has won the Louis A. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) for his book entitled Futures of Enlightenment Poetry.
The Phoenix is the English department journal for undergraduate student creative work. The 2021 edition was edited by Nicole Salama and Samantha Crouch. At the launch party, Top Submission Awards were given to Emily Drabek for her poem “Daisy,” Natalie Glasper for her story “The Tea Rose Hotel Gets Integrated,” and Melissa Leon Norena for her watercolor “A Jazzy Evening.” Faculty advisors for the magazine are Arna Hemenway, Mark Olsen, Chloe Honum, and Kevin Gardner. Congratulations to the editorial board, all of the student contributors, and the award-winners!
"Greg Garrett, Ph.D., professor of English at Baylor University, has been awarded a $488,000 grant by the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation to study those dynamics and illuminate the ways various forms of American culture have promoted racial myths through the centuries, influencing how people perceive others of different races." Click to read more from Baylor Media and Public Relations
Recent Faculty Publications
All Publications
After being abandoned by her mother in a most unusual place, a defiant heroine sticks to her plan for staying hidden—even though getting caught could mean saving her life. Holiday House, 2023.
Veteran TV journalist Calvin Jones travels to Paris, where he negotiates love, friendship, and despair in award-winning novelist Greg Garrett’s Bastille Day. Paraclete Press, 2023.
A representative selection of one of the UK’s most prolific and respected poets, comprised of nearly 300 poems. Baylor University Press, 2023.
Assesses Joyce’s employment of the Lukan Good Samaritan parable in relation to his short fiction and Ulysses. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
An analysis of the literary strategies wielded by Black women during the oppressive Jim Crow years. University Press of Mississippi, 2022.