The English Department fosters reading, writing, and media skills through a broad selection of small seminars. Our classes combine the study of English and American literature, exploring the craft of poetry, Shakespearean drama, science fiction, the techniques of horror films, the rhetoric of medicine, and the dynamics of novels, plays, short stories, and creative non-fiction.
The Writing Program supports a thriving culture of writing, coordinating courses for student writers, including first-year Academic Inquiry Seminars and a variety of communication-intensive courses, and offers pedagogical and curricular development for faculty and staff.
Writing Program Faculty and Student Awards
The Writing Program recently recognized and celebrated the accomplishments of student writers and writing faculty at Case Western Reserve University. These awards were detailed in The Daily.
Department of English Newsletter: March 2025
Letter from the Chair On a recent Friday night in Los Angeles, four CWRU English faculty read from their fiction and poetry for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs 2025 conference. Rumor has it that 130 guests arrived to hear their work, and the work of other Cleveland collaborators....
Department of English Newsletter: December 2024
Ryan Pfeiffer delivers the MacIntyre Lecture on Friday, December 6th: "Edward Taylor’s Epideictic Imagination." Letter from the Chair One of my favorite descriptions of a university comes from the poet Adrienne Rich, who calls it “a place where people can find each other and begin to hear each other.” The other day–...
Current Work
James Newlin‘s article, “Signs and Semblances: The Problem of Likability in Some Recent Productions of Much Ado About Nothing,“ has been published in the open-access journal Humanities.