Welcome
Welcome to the web site of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We are a large, diverse, and dynamic group of teachers and students. Our numbers have been increasing—ten new tenured and tenure-track faculty members joined us in 2005—as we maintain our traditional strengths in English and American Literature, Creative Writing, and Writing Studies, while developing new focuses in areas such as Print and Material Culture, New Media, and Irish Studies.
Recent faculty hires have created or deepened our links to interdisciplinary units such as American Indian Studies, Asian-American Studies, Cinema Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Latina/o Studies, Medieval Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. The interdisciplinary collaboration between students and faculty in Creative Writing and Art and Design is a distinctive feature of the prize-winning magazine Ninth Letter, which has become a centerpiece of our thriving MFA program, now in its fourth year. The department also hosts four major scholarly journals: American Literary History, Computers and Composition: An International Journal, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology.
Our graduate students arrive from all regions of the U.S. and several foreign countries. Admission standards are high and the financial support we provide is correspondingly generous. Most of our Ph.D. recipients are able to find tenure-track teaching jobs even in the midst of a difficult job market. We are equally dedicated to the education of undergraduate students, including our more than 1200 English majors. Every year our faculty members and graduate instructors win major teaching awards, and many more of them appear in the university’s List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students. Our commitment to excellence in undergraduate and graduate instruction is matched by our commitment to first-rate, cutting-edge research in our fields of scholarly expertise. Thanks to the extraordinary research productivity of our faculty members, we consistently are ranked among the top twenty English departments in the nation.
Should you have the chance to visit us in person, you will meet a talented, enthusiastic group of scholars, teachers, and writers who are always hard at work but never too much so to pause and welcome you. Please let us know how we can make our web site just as friendly and helpful.