About

The Department of English provides a rich environment for teaching, research, creative work, and service to the profession and the broader community. We address key questions of English Studies in diverse cultural, theoretical, and aesthetic contexts: How do texts, writers, and readers make meaning? What is at stake in the ways we produce and study literary, visual, and digital texts?

Our award-winning faculty are affiliated with one or more of four programs within the Department: Composition, Literature, Film and Media, and Writing; we work across programs as well as within single disciplines. We extend the reach of our departmental expertise by engaging in local, national, and global projects and collaborations. This provides a productive set of frameworks for faculty scholarship and teaching, for the professional preparation of graduate students, and for undergraduate learning.

Employing a wide range of approaches to construct diverse forms of knowledge, the Department of English strives to enhance and extend inclusion in our curriculum, community, and activities. Our programs of study in language, literature, film and media, and writing promote a diversity of perspectives and encourage inquiry into a range of textual, cultural, and theoretical traditions. We are also committed to having a diverse faculty and student body, recognizing our investment in the variety of viewpoints that diversity makes possible.

The Department of English is a part of the Division of Humanities in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. It employs about 55 tenured and tenure-stream faculty members. The department currently serves approximately 650 majors, minors, and certificate students and 110 graduate students, as well as the thousands of other students who take courses in the department. In addition to lecture series, reading series, conferences, and other events, the department supports four academic and literary journals, two book series, and five student-run publications.

The Dietrich School

The Dietrich School includes 31 academic departments and 12 interdisciplinary programs (including Cultural Studies and  Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, programs in which many English Department faculty and students are active). There are also a number of academic centers, including the Humanities Center, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and the World History Center. The school's history and philosophy departments are especially distinguished.

Affiliated Departments & Programs 

The Department of English maintains partnerships with many fine programs, centers, and departments (many within the Dietrich School) that offer exciting opportunities to students and faculty. 

  • Africana Studies
  • Cultural Studies
  • Film Studies
  • Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies 
  • The Humanities Center
  • The Keywords Project
  • Medieval and Renaissance Studies
  • University Center for International Studies
  • Western Pennsylvania Writing Project
  • Writing in the Disciplines