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Welcome to the English Department at John Carroll University.

You’ll find that our department—including our majors, graduate students, and faculty—forms a strong, vibrant academic community. Instructors take pleasure in imparting their knowledge and intellectual passion to students, in encouraging students to fashion their own understanding of literature and the world around them, and in responding to students’ academic and pre-professional needs. Our composition and rhetoric program, in which almost all students participate, aims to equip them with skills that will serve them well throughout their lives, in their academic careers and beyond. The English major itself is composed of three tracks. The literature track provides both grounding in traditional literary historical fields and exposure to the latest innovations in literary and interdisciplinary inquiry. The creative writing track offers not only instruction in diverse writing genres but also opportunities for students to present their own work in print and in public readings before the University community. The professional writing track emphasizes the importance of rhetoric and requires an internship. Students may submit their poems, short stories, photographs, or art work to the university literary magazine, The John Carroll Review, which is student-edited.

We offer a wide range of readings and lectures from authors and scholars outside the University. In an effort to expand this range, we have invited, over the last 10 years, notable international writers and scholars to campus under the auspices of our Hopkins Chair in British Literature.

Graduates from our department have gone on to become teachers, lawyers, doctors, scholars, judges, archivists, bankers, businessmen and women, curators, editors, playwrights, novelists, poets, critics, chefs, relief workers, social workers, civil servants, librarians, and counselors. We believe that our students are more than the jobs that they will take; they are men and women who will live lives shaped by the power and beauty of imaginative uses of language. Look at our offerings and if we can be of any help, please contact us.

Debra Rosenthal, Ph.D.
Chair