In the Department of English at Marquette University, storytelling is our passion. We are a community of creative thinkers who love to read and learn from great stories and to tell the stories that need to be told. We know the enduring importance of critical thinking, creative problem solving, and powerful writing in an ever-changing global economy.

In our small, discussion-based classes, you will receive a personalized education from expert, award-winning teachers who will know you well. They will help you inspire your creativity and hone your writing, communication, and critical-thinking skills. Our rigorous training will push you to articulate the future you want and how you can best serve the world.

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Our Mission

We are a community of scholar-teachers and students who embrace the traditional Jesuit conception of liberal education inspired by St. Ignatius of Loyola. Grounded in this tradition, the department focuses on the study of “humane letters,” which is accorded a central and indispensable place in Jesuit education and is defined as the study of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and history.

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Our Programs

Informed by this tradition as well as by contemporary English Studies, the department includes nationally and internationally prominent faculty and offers programs of study for undergraduate and graduate students. 

Undergraduate Programs

Graduate Programs

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Our Faculty

English Department faculty are actively engaged in research and publication as well as in teaching and service. Our faculty have expertise in British, American, and global Anglophone literature and culture, as well as in creative writing, professional writing, rhetoric and composition, and linguistics. They have won numerous awards for both research and teaching, including many University-wide honors. Committed to the scholar-teacher model, faculty regularly teach courses at all levels, from introductory surveys to graduate seminars.

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Student Takeaways

While pursuing English degrees, undergraduate and graduate students:

• Develop an understanding of the nature of language: its structure, its systematic change over time, and its relationship with social diversity in the United States.
• Develop an understanding and mastery of the art of rhetoric, specifically the ability to recognize and analyze rhetorical strategies of other writers and to construct clear and cogent arguments in a mature voice and individual style.
• Develop habits of logical thinking, proceeding from the identification of evidence, through the construction of hypotheses, to the identification of conclusions.
• Develop a knowledge and understanding of the traditions of literature in the English language, primarily British and American including postcolonial, multicultural, and women’s literatures.
• Develop analytical and research methods for critical, theoretical, and aesthetic engagement with this literature.
• Develop an understanding of how the imaginative constructs of poetry, drama, and prose (fiction and nonfiction) illuminate fundamental questions of human experience.
• Develop an understanding of how diverse sources and events in the past contribute to the richness and complexity of present cultures.

[Note: For a discussion of Jesuit concepts of “humane letters,” see The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, Chapter 12: "The Subjects Which Should Be Taught in the Universities of the Society."]