English majors adopting the Standard Curriculum have the option of choosing a Concentration. (Students emphasizing Creative Writing or Cinema Studies in effect have already chosen a concentration). While many students declare the English Major in their freshman or sophomore year at Penn, they usually do not choose a Concentration until they are juniors.

English offers fifteen distinct concentrations. They're ideal for students interested in interdisciplinary study, or who wish to develop a greater mastery of a particular subfield of English. A student successfully completing a concentration will have that concentration appear on his or her transcript.

All concentrations are comprised of four course units with at least two seminars. Most allow one (and often two) relevant courses outside English to count towards the concentration.

Click on each item to read a description of the concentration and to see which courses qualify for it.

• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures
• Gender, Literature, and Culture
• Medieval/Renaissance
• 18th- and 19th-century Literature and Culture
• 20th Century Literature and Culture
• Law and Literature
• Literature, Journalism and Print Culture
• Genre concentration in Drama
• Genre concentration in Poetry and Poetics
• Genre concentration in Prose Genres
• African and/or African-American Literature
• American Literature and Culture
• Celtic Studies
• Individualized

How to Declare a Concentration

Declaring a Concentration is simple. Here's how to do it:

• Create a new worksheet in Penn-in-Touch. Add an English major and choose your concentration. (You also can just delete your existing major in your current worksheet and then add the new one if you wish).
• Meet with your Faculty Advisor and fill in the bubbles on your worksheet. Have your Faculty Advisor change the status of your new worksheet over to "Official."
• Send an e-mail to Loretta Williams. Explain that you have met with your advisor, and request that she change your major designation to include the Concentration.

Planning and Pursuing Your Concentration

You should think of the planning of your concentraton as a significant intellectual exercise in itself, one in which you move from thinking of your education as a mere ticking off of requirements to one in which you plan your own course of study one and even two semesters ahead. What degree of knowledge do you wish to possess about a particular part of literary history, literary culture, or literary theory when you graduate? Which genres, periods, or areas of literature do you wish to know well? What kinds of inroads into other disciplines do you wish to make?

Nearly all concentrations carry an interdisciplinary component. We actively encourage our majors to take up to three courses outside of English closely related to their concentrations. You and your Faculty Advisor should work together to decide on these courses since, as faculty, we are less concerned with your choice of concentration than with your ability to put together a rigorous course of study that possesses a superior level of intellectual coherence. That, and nothing less, should be the standard guiding English majors as they pursue their studies.