Undergraduate Mission

The University of Iowa English Department promotes serious and disciplined study of literature as an art form, as an expression of cultural preoccupations, and as a means of participating in civil society. In departments like ours, that value cultural, global, and aesthetic diversity, “literature” encompasses an ever growing array of texts in English and includes a wide range of genres and modes from drama, fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to video, graphic novels, and film to radio essays, new media, material culture, and performance art.

Our curriculum includes long-celebrated masterpieces by familiar American and British writers as well as provocative reclaimed works from the past and new works that are shaping the future. Our classes also explore the power of language in work that speaks from and about diverse U.S. ethnicities and Anglophone communities.

We offer students the tools of close reading, formal analysis, literary history, critical theory, research strategies, and rigorous, respectful debate. We ask students to show us they can use these tools in class discussions and in analytical and creative written assignments. We train students to develop, discuss, and write critically about the ways literature and language have profoundly influenced the values, beliefs, and lived experience of societies over centuries and across geographical boundaries. 

When our English majors head out into the world, we expect that they will carry with them a passion for reading, a commitment to use language self-consciously and ethically, and a readiness to embrace the new and challenging experiences that wide reading encourages. We believe the education our majors gain as readers and writers will be invaluable whether they work in education, the arts, business, the nonprofit sector, the government, a community organization, or in other careers. We also believe that lifelong engagement with literature is one of our best hopes for the curiosity, critical thinking, compassion, acceptance, inspiration, and action that are crucial to a just society and global community.

The English major teaches students to become:

• rigorous readers
• critical thinkers
• effective speakers
• compelling writers
• engaged world citizens