Welcome to Penn State English, a department of pathbreaking scholars, magnificent teachers, talented students, and accomplished alumni. Our faculty—many well-known scholars and national leaders among them—have set a standard of excellence for the department and for the University. Indeed, in the most recent National Research Council ranking of doctoral programs (2010), Penn State English placed near the top, behind only Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, and Columbia.
Our faculty cover all major areas of literary scholarship, rhetoric, and creative writing; our work includes projects on Milton’s theorizations of freedom and tyranny, the literature of Global Asias, the rhetoric of climate change, the language of programming and software development, film adaptations of Shakespeare, the implications of information technology for writing programs, and the history of narratives of polar exploration—just to name a few. We are justly proud of our pathbreaking archival work, which extends from editions of works and letters of Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, and Anna Julia Cooper to the creation of interactive digital exhibits documenting the history of Black organizing in the Colored Conventions Project and the Center for Black Digital Research. Our faculty have led national scholarly organizations and have won national and international recognition—as well as some of the most prestigious awards in the humanities. Our creative writing program is an integral part of our department, offering workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction as well as readings on and off campus that sustain a thriving community of readers and writers of all ages.
Here, you’ll find that great researchers and world-class scholars do not achieve success at the expense of their engagement with students. Quite the contrary: faculty members in the Department of English are committed to sharing their scholarly and creative work with their students, and we take it as a point of pride that we have won more university-wide teaching awards than any other department on campus.
Our mission is to foster the critical thinking, creativity, and communication skills that enrich our undergraduates’ lives and help prepare them for the challenges of the job market; to train our graduate students to become tomorrow’s leading scholars and teachers; and to maintain our nationally prominent academic job placement success.
It helps, of course, that our students are smart, energetic, optimistic, and committed to public service. Our doctoral students have earned one of the highest job placement rates in our cohort, and our undergraduate students have gone on to careers as writers, teachers, editors, lawyers, corporate executives, and even doctors. Their work ethic matches our own.
Our department offers a place for students, faculty, and alumni—in Happy Valley and beyond—to explore the dazzling range of written expression in English, and to pursue their love of language and literature to the fullest. We hope that you will join our vibrant community of readers, writers, and thinkers.
Jack Selzer, Emeritus Professor and former President of the Rhetoric Society of America, has written a history of the department over the past hundred-or-so years. Read about the Department’s History.