Department of English

On the 75th Anniversary of Brandeis...

Professor Ulka Anjaria's hope for the future: "We will continue to read — and read widely, across more borders — not limiting ourselves to already familiar worlds."

Read all her hopes in "Brandeis at 75: Across Boundaries."

Eileen Myles, Oct. 17

Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls, Working Life) will give a reading at Brandeis on Oct. 17. Part of the Creative Writing Reading Series.

Details here.

The Careers of PhD Alums

Learn about the interesting career paths of Jacob Burg, PhD'20 and Hanh Bui, PhD'21.

Read here (June 21).

students and faculty standing on rooftop garden

PhD Students Join With Middlesex Community College Instructors for Transformative Reading-Writing Pedagogy Institute

GSAS hosted Brandeis’s inaugural summer Teaching Institute in Reading-Writing Pedagogy, designed to give doctoral students hands-on, intensive training in pedagogy for reading- and writing-heavy courses.

Statement on the Murders of AAPI People in Atlanta

The English department stands in solidarity with our Asian and Asian American colleagues, students, staff here at Brandeis, and with communities more broadly in light of ongoing violence against these communities outlined in the “Stop AAPI Hate National Report” issued by the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center on March 19, 2021, just before the murders in Atlanta. We own and mourn the mass murder in Atlanta, and incidents since that time.

Read Full Statement

Department Initiatives in Response to the Racist Killings by Police, 6/9/20

The Brandeis University English Department is enraged at the police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, of Breonna Taylor and David McAttee in Louisville, of Tony McDade in Tallahassee, and the many others who have been killed by police. We give our support to Black communities, Black organizations, and the Movement for Black Lives that have demanded justice and accountability in the wake of the ongoing and pervasive criminalization, hyper-incarceration, and state murder of Black men, women, and children in all 50 states and around the globe.

These protests reflect a long history of Black struggle against the systematic structures of racism, antiblackness, and oppression that have been part of the U.S.’s settler colonial and racial capitalist projects. We are an English department in a state and community with a history and present of racism, as discussed by local journalists. Massachusetts also has the history of Crispus Attucks, a Black man who was the first casualty in the Boston Massacre of 1770, along with the Boston Tea Party, the first violent looting of the American Revolution.

We understand that in order to dismantle white supremacy we must continue to resist racism and especially antiblackness in our classroom pedagogy, training for graduate students, and our vision and goals for the department. This work must center how to make a material difference in the lives of our Black colleagues, staff, students, and community.

Read Full Statement

Immerse Yourself in Literature and Culture

Studying English can help you perfect your understanding of a language you already use and enhance your appreciation for cultures you inhabit and/or encounter. The Brandeis Department of English trains students not only in skills for the present but also in deep knowledge of the past.

We teach and study poetry and prose, as well as journalism, film, television and new media, and place these texts in historical and geographic context.

We study the past because literary works shape themselves as a tradition in which dialogue, disruption, revision and influence occur over time; and because, for many of us, context is integral to comprehending the particular novel, poem or essay under study. Extension over the globe complements immersion in the past. Wherever people rely on English — wherever some version of the tongue is spoken and written — we consider it our mission to study the literature and culture in which and to which it is put to use.

Literary Genres

We teach a wide variety of genres within literature in English. The main rubrics might be poetry, prose, drama and media, under which a vast array of overlapping and heterogeneous subcategories will fall. These will put the kinds of qualities that we study to different use, depending on whether they are fictional or not, political or not, persuasive or expressive, public or private, philosophical or historical, religious or secular. The discrimination and analysis of these qualities and categories, their similarities and differences, belong to literary (and media) criticism, and we therefore teach the practice of criticism, but we do so by also teaching its theory, its history, and its philosophy. None of these categories is hard and fast in practice, and in different contexts any of them might merge with any other.

Degree Programs

The Department of English offers the following degree programs:

English Dept. Podcast Series

OpenBook: An English Dept. Podcast

In this series of podcasts, Undergraduate Department Representatives from English and Creative Writing interview professors to help students get to know the faculty better both as scholars and as people. Listen to these podcasts to hear a little bit more about your professors than you may learn in the classroom!