Welcome to the Department of English at ASU, where you may pursue creative writing; culture, technology and environment; English education; film and media studies; linguistics and applied linguistics; literature; narrative studies; and writing, rhetorics and literacies.
We also house the university’s Writing Programs, whose composition courses are taken by almost every first-year ASU student.
We’re glad you’re here. When you study in the Department of English, you’re supported by nearly 700 faculty and graduate students who are rigorously trained in the latest teaching and research methods exploring not just local, but global expressions of the English language in all media. You’re surrounded by experts in everything from videogame studies to medieval studies, from health humanities to desert humanities, from young adult literature to Shakespeare, from classical rhetoric to data literacy.
Our motto―start here; go anywhere―captures the unique values of an English major, culture, technology and environment major, or a film and media studies major. In these areas of study, you learn the imaginative, analytical, and interpretive skills necessary for living an engaged life and pursuing a rewarding career. Our degrees open doors to careers in publishing, media, management, teaching, governmental or non-profit work, and they can be springboards for professional study, such as in law and medicine.
One of the largest English departments nationally, we believe our mission befits our scale. Our aim is to prepare citizens who can think, read, and write critically, pose and solve problems, and communicate effectively in their academic, personal, professional, and public lives. These skills are necessary, now more than ever. In a global economy where professionals change jobs on average twelve times during their lives, humanities degrees, like those in English or culture, technology and environment or film and media studies, prepare graduates to remain agile in the marketplace of ideas.
For these reasons, ASU and the Department of English are committed to excellence and access. Of the more than 2,500 students pursuing degrees in the Department of English, 26% are students of color, 44% are Pell grant eligible, and 27% are the first in their families to attend a university. In the Department of English, people are willing to try new things, and we imagine failure as simply a step toward success.
What can you do with a degree from the Department of English?
Our answer is: whatever you can imagine! And we will be there to help you.
—Manushag "Nush" Powell
Professor and Chair
Department of English
"The humanities well-equip us to tell better stories about both history and the present and are integral in shaping more humane communities to come."
—Jeffrey Cohen, ASU humanities dean and English professor