Programs and Areas
Areas
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African-American Literature
The English Department at Ohio State University has a number of faculty with strong interests in African American culture from various perspectives including literature, rhetoric and composition, folklore, and socio-linguistics. -
Old and Middle English Literature
With nationally-recognized strength in the study of medieval literature, language, and culture, our department offers students a rich variety of courses as well as many quarterly opportunities to get together with other medievalists for intellectual and social pursuits. -
Renaissance Literature
As a period of study, the Renaissance has infinite riches and pleasure to offer students. From the works of Shakespeare to the poetry of Aemelia Lanyer (one of the earliest published women poets in English); from vernacular translations of the Bible to the erotic verse of John Donne; from epigrams to epics, poets to poetasters, the literature of the Renaissance will delight and teach all who encounter it. -
Restoration/Eighteenth-Century British Literature
The literature associated with neoclassicism, the popular presses, the Enlightenment , the sentimental, and the gothic registered the emergence of the modern subject and the English novel, the height of the slave trade, the century of political revolutions in Europe and the colonies, the rise of the consumer society and the birth of the factory, and an obsession with politeness. -
British Romantic and Victorian Literature
Living in a period in which far-reaching cultural changes were taking place, the writers of the Romantic and Victorian age were reacting to--and contributing to--such historical and cultural events as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the growth of nationalism, the struggle for women's rights, the struggle to abolish slavery and the slave trade, the growth of science, the crisis of religious faith, the struggle for Irish independence, and the growth of--and resistance to--the British Empire. -
American Literature to 1900
American literature before 1900 covers 350 years of literary history in and about the United States, from the earliest descriptions of the "New World" through the rise of Realism and the earliest confrontations with modernism. -
Twentieth-Century British and American Literature
The Department of English has a large group of faculty interested in twentieth-century literature (modern, modernist, and contemporary), language, Film Folklore, folklore, feminist studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. -
Critical Theory
We have specialists in the major schools and movements of literary theory from formalism to poststructuralism and critical race theory, in the cognate disciplines such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism; and in the literary genres, particularly narrative and performance. -
Film Studies
For more than a decade, the study of film has been among the fastest growing disciplines at American colleges and universities. Our diverse program engages with the entire culture of cinema, teaching students to think historically, theoretically, and critically about film. -
Folklore
Folklorists take a holistic, ethnographic approach to the study of culture. They enter a village, a factory, a church, or a student subculture to be instructed in the forms of expression used by that community to shape its reality and conduct its affairs. -
Language and Linguistics
Nothing characterizes the nature of humans more than the ability to use language. In linguistics, one studies languages not to read, write, or speak them, but to understand how they work, how they change, how children learn them, and how they are used.
Programs
First Year Writing Program
As part of the three-tiered writing component of the General Education Curriculum, first-year writing courses emphasize ways that writing is a primary element of active, creative learning in literate cultures.
Second Year Writing Program
English 367: The U.S. Experience
English 367 is the second of two composition courses that the University requires most undergraduates to take (the first is English 110). Because English 367 is a higher level course (generally taken by students in their second year), it offers texts and ideas that are more challenging and thought-provoking than you would find in a first-year writing course.
Creative Writing Program
The purpose of the Creative Writing Program at The Ohio State University is to help graduate students develop to the fullest their talents and abilities as writers of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, with a hope of eventual publication. Creative writing classes are conducted as workshops or tutorials, with emphasis given to manuscripts written by the students.
Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Program
We have a proud history as a program with a focus on rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies.
Rhetoric at OSU asks how discourse works, and students in rhetoric enjoy a wide range of options for the study of rhetorical culture as shaped by class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, and local context. We take up historical investigations into rhetorical practices in a wide range of periods and cultural setting; theoretical exploration of rhetorical situations, functions, norms, and boundaries; critical analysis of rhetorical strategies and choices within and across texts, broadly conceived; and pedagogical inquiry into the transmission of expressive and receptive ability from one generation to the next. All these modes of inquiry help us to understand how discourse works across all the genres and technologies of cultural production, including for example orations and orality, letters and literacy, sermons and the sermonic, images and the imaginary, plays and the performative, commercials and the commodified, films and the spectacle, institutions and their reproduction, selves and their fashioning.
Composition scholars at OSU have concentrated upon areas of pedagogy (critical, feminist, and collaborative pedagogical theories, for instance), institutional histories of composition studies, and composition theory. They may perform quantitative and/or qualitative analyses in order to study the writing process in academic contexts or outside the academy. Compositionists at Ohio State have also focused on business and technical writing, first-year writing, basic writing, and advanced composition.
Thinking clearly, knowledgeably, and critically about literacy is an inescapable need today and the goal of Literacy Studies. As we clarify our usage and our understanding about literacy(ies), we not only hold the potential to improve our communications and abilities to collaborate but we also have a rare opportunity to reinvigorate teaching and learning. Literacy Studies aims to foster a critical, conversation and collaborative investigation into the nature of literacy, bringing together historical, contextual, comparative, and critical perspectives and modes of understanding, stimulating new institutional and intellectual relationships between different disciplinary clusters and their constituents.Project Narrative
Project Narrative aims to promote state-of-the art research and teaching in the field of narrative studies. Drawing on ideas from multiple disciplines, the Project focuses on narrative in all of its guises, from everyday storytelling in face-to-face interaction, to oral history and autobiography, to films, graphic novels, and narratives associated with digital environments, to the multitude of stories found in the world's narrative literature. For more information visit: http://projectnarrative.osu.edu/
Writing Workshop Program
The Writing Workshop Program offers opportunities for students to work intensively on their writing in meaningful ways in addition to the writing experience that English 110 provides. In that sense, Workshop courses (English 109.01, 109.02, and 110.03 and 193.03) are transitions between high school and college, providing additional practice in doing the kinds of work that will be required in other college classes: reading, writing, discussion, and critical thinking.
Digital Media Studies (DMS)
OSU’s Digital Media Studies (DMS) program aims to lead in innovative research and teaching involving new media technologies and the study of emerging media forms. Our program reaches across specializations within English studies—rhetoric, composition, literature, folklore, literacy studies, and film studies—and consists of a fully integrated set of curricular offerings at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Digital Media Studies program is highly collaborative and connects faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students in cutting-edge projects that includ, digital audio and video production, graphic design, and Web design. Additionally, the DMS program is committed to reaching beyond the university setting and into the community at large with efforts in schools, community literacy programs, and national educational venues.
