Department of English
In the Department of English, students can study the contemporary graphic novel and the films of Alfred Hitchcock; they can immerse themselves in Arthurian legend and learn about Inuit literature. Known for its comprehensive coverage, the department offers courses on William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, David Lynch, David Garrick, and John Milton, as well as American and Canadian literature, modernism, the Victorian novel, lyric poetry, and other subjects. Courses span the Romantic culture of celebrity and the modern celebrity of JFK.
Ranked twelfth in the world in the 2011 QS rankings, the Department of English at McGill is unique in that its undergraduate program brings together three different but related areas of study: Literature, Drama and Theatre, and Cultural Studies. Undergraduate students follow one of the three options in their program of study and also take courses in the other streams. This three-part organization of the undergraduate curriculum characterizes teaching and research in the Department as a whole. This tripartite organization also reflects the diversity of expertise of faculty members and allows research and teaching across specialist boundaries. For example, after learning about how people dressed in Jacobean England, students can create historically informed costumes for a play in Moyse Hall.
Graduate students, key participants in all areas of Department life, also have the opportunity to explore aspects of Literature, Cultural Studies, Performance, and Theatre History in their seminar work and research. At any given time, there are approximately 80 graduate students enrolled in the MA and PhD programs.
The Department is home to—or is a principal participant in—a number of major, collaborative research projects and research groups, including the McGill Medievalists, the Shakespeare Team, Novelists on the Novel, Cuizine, Interacting with Print, the Digital Costume Project, and the Burney Centre.
Members of the Department share three principles that guide their work and their interactions with students and fellow researchers:
- Research and teaching are inseparable.
- The best forms of knowledge are critical and self-reflexive.
- Tradition is a living thing.
The works studied in the Department of English not only stimulate the mind, they also arouse powerful emotional responses. The intellectual and emotional wholeness of the works that we study entails the capacity of literature, theatre, and visual culture to educate and delight.
