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

English Studies Learning Outcomes (online)

Students who complete the online degree in English will be able to do the following:
  1. Interpret texts through close and careful reading
  2. Articulate and apply major critical approaches in the interpretation of literary texts
  3. Demonstrate knowledge of rhetorical, theoretical, and social functions of language
  4. Understand major historical periods, trends, and movements in English-language literature
  5. Develop good research skills; gather, evaluate, interpret, and use information logically, accurately, and ethically
  6. Work effectively with critical, historical, and other secondary sources
  7. Effectively practice the writing skills of drafting, revising, editing, and critiquing
  8. Produce clearly written and well-argued prose with close attention to purpose and audience
  9. Create a vigorously revised body of written work under close faculty supervision
  10. Demonstrate competence in the use of technology associated with traditional and new communications media