Mission Statement    

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Welcome to the Department of

English & Comparative Literature

Welcome to the official Web site of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati.

We teach and publish in a variety of areas, including literature, creative writing, composition and rhetoric, professional writing and editing, journalism, linguistics and cultural studies. Our faculty publish their work in leading journals and book series and presents papers at national and international conferences, with 14 books and more than 100 shorter works in all areas of departmental focus published in the past two years.

Our graduate students also publish and present widely, with five books and dozens of poems, stories and articles appearing in the past two years. Graduates have gone on to faculty positions at research oriented institutions such as Columbia, Cornell, Duke, the University of Iowa, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, as well as at teaching oriented institutions such as Gonzaga, Mount St. Joseph’s, Thomas More, Xavier, the University of Dayton, and the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

We take teaching seriously in the department, and we do it well. Our faculty have in recent years won every teaching award offered by the university. Moreover, members of the faculty also offer courses in Women's Studies, American Ethnic Studies, Celtic Studies, Religious Studies and the University Honors Program.

As a department, our instructional mission is vast. At the upper level, our highly regarded doctoral program in literature and creative writing serves our most advanced students. At the beginning undergraduate level, we offer a nationally recognized first year composition program, the only course sequence required of all students throughout the university. In between, we provide comprehensive majors in English and Journalism, with the English major now offering three exciting new tracks. We teach more than 15,000 students per year, graduate and undergraduate, major and non-major alike, one of the largest totals of any department in the university.

We are fortunate to have the resources to bring to campus internationally known scholars and writers throughout the academic year.

This Web site provides a closer look at our department, our mission and the dynamic, diverse opportunities awaiting our undergraduate and graduate students. I hope you find it interesting, and I invite you to contact me at russel.durst@uc.edu if you would like additional information.

Russel Durst
Professor and Head