English

Mission

The English Department at UMass Lowell provides a rigorous and diverse curriculum for its majors, combining solid disciplinary foundations with opportunities for research, writing, performance, community engagement, and practical experience, leading to a range of possible career pathways and graduate programs for students to pursue. The curriculum across our five concentrations encourages the development of critical thinking, reading, and writing skills that serve English majors well beyond the university. Small class sizes encourage active learning, interaction with student peers, and engagement with faculty who are renowned scholars, writers, and artists publishing and performing in a wide variety of literary and cultural traditions. The English Department serves the broader university community with its First Year Writing Program and its required College Writing sequence, and by offering a range of General Education/Core Curriculum courses that appeal to students from a variety of departments and colleges across campus. The English Department also believes in service to and partnership with the broader community and regularly integrates scholarship, creative work, teaching, and service with community engagement.

Requirements of the Major

Literature Learning Outcomes

Students who complete their degree in English with a concentration in Literature will be able to do the following:

  1. Explicate a text through close and careful reading
  2. Articulate the key terms, foundational assumptions, and central concepts of modern critical and theoretical movements
  3. Deploy major critical modes in the interpretation of literary works
  4. Demonstrate knowledge of rhetorical, theoretical, and social functions of language 
  5. Distinguish the sequence of literary periodization
  6. Evaluate research sources for authority, accuracy, and appropriateness
  7. Synthesize multiple sources in a research paper with correct and appropriate documentation of all sources
  8. Produce clearly written and well-argued papers in academic prose
  9. Communicate orally in formal presentations and informal class discussion