UVM’s English
Department
offers instruction in a wide range of areas of literary and cultural
studies, as well as creative writing and composition and rhetoric.
One of the oldest English departments in the
nation, the department offers courses ranging from those in major
figures (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison), eras
(Renaissance, Victorian, Modern), and genres (novel, drama, poetry),
through offerings in critical theory and literatures outside the
established canon (including women’s writing, the history and criticism
of film and television, and post-colonial Anglophone literatures in
Africa and the Caribbean), to courses in creative nonfiction, fiction,
and poetry. Uniting most of these
offerings is a commitment to understanding the richness and
workings of texts, with film, television, popular culture and
women’s studies extending that commitment into new and exciting
dimensions. The department is justly
proud of its offerings in African-American, post-colonial, and women’s
writing.
The English
Department is made
up of 31 tenured and tenure-track professors, each with particular
scholarly and teaching interests, 20 lecturers, and 11 graduate
teaching assistants in its M.A. program. Because
the faculty is committed to teaching at all levels, introductory
through graduate, students have access to any professor in the
department through courses, advising, and independent study work. With
rare exceptions, class size is held to 35 and, more usually, 30, and advanced
writing courses and seminars are
limited to 18. The department currently
has over 400 English majors, making it one of the largest in the College
of Arts and Sciences.
Our recently redesigned
major
places priority on two things: paying close attention to texts and
their contexts, and developing approaches to works of literature
and cultural production informed by recent developments in literary
theory. The choices within the major are
many and flexible: It is possible to be an
English major with a strong concentration in such special interests as
creative writing or the literature of a specific period. Each semester the Deparment offers between 30 and 40
different courses for English majors, with multiple sections of the
most popular courses so that classes are small enough to enable
professors to emphasize discussion and pay attention to individual
students’ work.
English majors
can participate
in the Buckham Program of Study Abroad, a year- or semester-long
program of study at the University
of Kent in Canterbury,
England. There
is a special yearly Buckham Seminar in which a distinguished visitor
meets with a seminar for a week or more - recent years have seen the
novelists John Edgar Wideman, Amitav Ghosh, Stephen King and William
Kennedy, and the scholars Stanley Fish, Sacvan Bercovitch, Houston
Baker, and Barbara Johnson come to campus. Majors
can also sign up for College Honors, Departmental Honors, and
independent study. The department supports
an English Majors’ Union, a literary magazine,
and
student-sponsored colloquia with faculty. Each
fall begins with an English majors’ barbeque attended by over 300
students and faculty, and each spring ends with Departmental Honors
Day, when the department awards a variety of prizes in recognition of
scholarly and artistic achievement.
Besides graduate study
in a
number of fields such as medicine, law, journalism, education, or of
course English, English majors from UVM’s English Department have
followed a variety of interesting career paths. About 30 percent enter
education in a variety of capacities; 26 percent turn to business and
finance; and 14 percent are involved in journalism, publishing, public
relations, or advertising. sizing as it does precision of thought and
clarity of expression, as well as critical thinking and research
methods-is fine preparation for a variety of careers.
The scholarship of the
English
faculty covers most facets of literary, critical, cultural studies, and
composition study, as well as significant creative publication in
fiction, non-fiction narrative, and poetry. On
the fourth floor of the Old Mill, where the English Department is
located, two bookcases display the books which have been recently
authored by members of the department.
For further
information
contact:
Professor Helen Scott,
Director of Undergraduate Advising
Department of English
University of Vermont
400 Old Mill
94 University Place
Burlington, VT 05405-0114
Telephone: (802) 656-3056
e-mail: Helen.Scott@uvm.edu
