Why Major in English at Georgetown?
Our lives are filled with stories, and these stories enable us to make sense of our own realities as well as to encounter other worlds, other persons, and other times than our own. Studying English offers magnificent and powerful insights into how we imagine our best and worst selves. Majoring in English means intensive study of what really matters.
English majors take small classes with dynamic and engaged faculty, who specialize in a range of fields, genres, historical periods, and critical perspectives. As an English major, you will study the language and form of the stories we tell—whether they appear in poetry, plays, novels, memoirs, films or video games—and consider both the overpowering and understated emotions, epic and petty conflicts, heroic and banal acts, and the grand and simple language that offer the widest range of understanding who we are.
The Georgetown English department encourages students to engage imaginatively and articulately with society while giving them the chance to develop confidence in their own voices. Not only are English students able to question and to understand the forces behind the injustices they will encounter today, they will be prepared to enact new ways to overcome them.
A major in English encourages students to extend their vision beyond themselves and to witness human experience with breadth and sympathy, to understand the history and traditions that have shaped the world around them, to recognize, as they live each day, both the murderous facts that blight the human condition and the marvelous realities that redeem it.