Hofstra University's Department of English offers undergraduate concentrations in English and American literature, creative writing, and publishing
Hofstra University's Department of English offers undergraduate concentrations in English and American literature, creative writing, and publishing, and the university's close proximity to New York City enriches the curriculum and provides incomparable opportunities for internships and experiential learning programs. The Great Writers, Great Readings series, started in 2004, brings award-winning writers across the genres to campus to engage students in intimate writing workshops and readings. Students can get published in a student literary magazine, Font; join a chapter of the English honor society Sigma Tau Delta; or participate in the College's oldest study abroad program, in London, studying contemporary British playwrights from Samuel Beckett to Tom Stoppard.
You will be taught and mentored by a diverse and accomplished faculty consisting of nationally recognized literary scholars, editors, novelists, poets, playwrights, and popular writers. Students are sure to find their niche in a nurturing department where faculty research and writing interests range from Milton to Herman Melville to Toni Morrison, from opera and pop culture to gay and lesbian studies and disability studies.
The English Department faculty is committed to serving students and developing their literary knowledge, editing skills, and writing talents in lectures, seminars, and workshops. Professors of literature and creative writing hold the highest degrees in their fields. Those who teach publishing have at least 20 years of experience in the industry.
Our alumni have found success in a wide range of careers, including publishing, academia, law, advertising, television, and film. Students have also continued their studies in Hofstra's MFA in creative writing program.
Mission Statement
We, the faculty of the Department of English, take as our project the critical and creative engagement with literatures in English. Our concerns include the uses of language; the pleasures of reading and writing; the aesthetic, rhetorical, and ideological functions of textuality; literary and critical theories; and literatures in translation.
In the belief that literature shapes and transforms individual lives and societies, we seek to help students to develop as careful readers, critical thinkers, and effective writers, able to question the construction of knowledge and literary canons. A sustained and intensive exploration of literatures in English prepares students to think critically and act meaningfully in interrelated areas of their lives–personal, professional, economic, social, political, ethical, and cultural. Through a diverse curriculum, we aim to foster heightened awareness of the form and content of texts, their ordinary and extraordinary uses of language, their apparent coherencies and radical instabilities, the continuities and discontinuities of literary traditions, and the many periods, cultures, and contexts in which texts emerge. We hope graduates in English leave Hofstra University careful thinkers and clear writers, engaged and thoughtful citizens, able to critique the agendas and assumptions underlying the many texts that constitute their worlds, including even this mission statement.
We offer undergraduate degrees in literature, creative writing, and publishing studies as well as two M.A. degrees, one in English and one in literature and creative writing. Our emphasis on rigorous analysis, scholarship, and lucid writing as well as library and online research, creative expression in various genres, and the editing and publishing of texts prepares students for a range of careers and for advanced study in a variety of fields. The enduring concerns of studies in English also effect an inward transformation that is not susceptible to measurement. The impact of our teaching is evident not only within the span of a specific course, semester, or academic program but also over the span of a lifetime.
