Welcome!
The Department of English is comprised of a vibrant community of top scholars, world-class educators, celebrated writers, and highly accomplished students from across the globe.
A Message from the Chair of the Department of English
Dear Reader:
Welcome to our website!
Our English Department boasts an extraordinary full-time and part-time faculty including over eighty professors with fields of expertise in the literature, media, and culture of Medieval and Early Modern England, Victorian and Modern Britain, and America from the early nineteenth century to the present. We are home to specialists in world Anglophone literature from regions including Africa, India, and the Caribbean, as well as to faculty in creative writing, composition and rhetoric, critical theory, cultural studies, critical race studies, ethnic and class studies, performance and film and media studies, disability studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.
As scholars producing world-class research in a wide range of humanities fields, as well as creative artists producing influential, innovative work in a wide variety of genres, our faculty have earned an impressive array of national and international prizes for both our artistic and our scholarly publications. The work of our faculty has been supported by fellowships, grants and other awards from sources like the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center.
We offer comprehensive, flexible, and rigorous courses of study to our undergraduate majors, minors, and MA students. Our undergraduate honors students and Master’s students pursue their own advanced research with the support and guidance of faculty mentors. We offer a Minor in Creative Writing, and we are also home to the University Writing Program, which oversees all first-year writing courses for students on the main campus, writing-intensive courses in all majors, and the Georgetown University Writing Center.
We are proud of our English Alumni, who have gone on to do wonderful things professionally; their paths include teaching at all levels, journalism in all media, and publishing fiction, drama, and poetry, in both traditional venues and for film, television, radio, and the web. Many have applied their humanities training to professions like law, medicine, and business. As the Statement of Principles on our homepage confirms, we take pride in instilling in our students a core commitment to the common good, and a conviction in the equal dignity and worth of each human being. We believe these should be the hallmarks of a humanities education, especially at an institution enlivened by its Jesuit and Catholic heritage.
In addition to our excellent faculty and curricular offerings, the Georgetown English Department currently enjoys productive partnerships with the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal), the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and the Caine Prize for African Writing. Many of our colleagues serve as affiliate faculty in partner units at Georgetown, including the Department of African American Studies, and the Programs in American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Film and Media Studies, Catholic Studies, Global Medieval Studies, Justice and Peace Studies, Disability Studies, and Journalism. And, as part of our commitment to social justice in the community and on campus, we are the long-time home of the Sursum Corda youth literacy tutoring project (now known as the Golden Rule Program), as well as a long-time partner of Georgetown’s Center for Social Justice and Community Scholars Program.
This greeting cannot list all of the additional ways that our department supports the work of our students and the life of our campus. None of it would be possible without the support we receive in turn from our top-notch professional office staff, who make sure that everything we do runs smoothly and reliably.
To our guests to this webpage, we invite your questions and suggestions for making this website more helpful to you, and we invite you to visit us during office hours on the third and fourth floors of New North Hall. We take genuine pride in our efforts to make our workspace professional, hospitable, inclusive, and safe. We look forward to welcoming you here if you wish to visit us as a guest, or are interested in joining us as a student or colleague.
Gratefully,
Daniel Shore, Ph.D.
Department Chair