Welcome to the English Department

at the University of Pennsylvania

With 40 full-time standing faculty, nearly 400 majors, 75 minors, and a graduate program that enrolls about 12 Ph.D. students and about 5 Masters students each year, English is one of the largest departments in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences. Our research faculty are among the nation's best across the entire range of periods and subfields, from Medieval and Renaissance Studies to Gender and Sexuality Studies, Transatlantic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Postcolonial and Globalization Theory, Asian American Literature, and Contemporary Poetics. Our goal is not to entrench these existing areas of disciplinary specialization but to bring them into new and productive articulation with one another and with the innovative work being done in other disciplines.

One indication of our interdisciplinary orientation is that our faculty are serving or have recently served as directors of the Penn Humanities Forum, Kelly Writers House, the Material Text Seminar, the The Center for Africana Studies , the South Asia Center, and the Programs in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Cinema Studies, and have won more teaching awards than any other department in the School. Our undergraduate Alumni have gone on to highly successful careers in advertising, publishing, journalism, law, information technology, and other fields; many of them participate in our Career Nights or have joined our English Career Liaison Database, providing a network of helpful contacts for current Penn English Majors.