Department of English

Ohio State English — one of the largest English departments in the United States — is an innovative, flexible department that produces first-rate research and creative work while also focusing on creative course offerings, attention to diversity and comprehensive advising of our majors. Both disciplinary and interdisciplinary in our individual and collective work, the department supports BA, MA/PhD and MFA students in all subdisciplines of the field of English studies, preparing them for a wide range of careers. The great strength of Ohio State's English department is our depth within disciplinary breadth. Ohio State English faculty are doing field-changing research and creative production in every subfield that constitutes the discipline of English studies — defined as the production, interpretation and evaluation of texts. Even as the dimensions of English studies have expanded substantially over the past 20 years, the discipline remains fundamentally committed to the study and creation of English-language texts in their historical and cultural contexts, as formal structures and as modes of practice. Thus, the many fields encompassed by English studies are united by a shared concern with texts, their circumstances of production and the ways in which they can be interpreted. The Ohio State Department of English comprises faculty who work on literary history (Old and Middle English; Renaissance; 18th-, 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century British literature and American literature; U.S. ethnic and postcolonial literatures); linguistics; rhetoric, composition and literacy; creative writing (poetry, fiction, nonfiction prose, and screenwriting); narrative theory; digital media studies; folklore; popular culture studies (film, TV, comics and popular genres such as science fiction and fantasy); children’s literature; women’s, gender and sexuality studies; history of the book; and literary theory. Those subfields converge under public-facing research and teaching areas featuring faculty with national and worldwide reputations, including disability studies, medical humanities, human rights studies, literacy studies and environmental humanities. Many Oho State English faculty members’ work crosses more than one of our subject area groups, and we are equipped to direct dissertations in all these subfields. Ohio State English is diverse and inclusive, collaborative across subfields, internally interdisciplinary and externally cross-disciplinary, large enough to incorporate emerging subfields in English studies while maintaining our legacy strengths, and flexible enough to accommodate individual faculty members’ developing research expertise in new subfields. In a world where “narrow specialization” is a demerit, we are the English department of the future.