We have a wide variety of courses designed to help students become competent and responsible readers and writers who can analyze, understand, and shape the language and cultures we study, including:Composition, Rhetoric, Literary History and Theory, Creative Writing (including Play and Screen Writing), Linguistics, Stylistics, Technical and Business Writing, English Education, African-American and Ethnic Literature, Women's Literature, Folklore, Popular Culture (including Science Fiction), and Film.
Most of our classes are small, and our honors program offers extra opportunities for small seminars, supervised tutorials, and an honors thesis. Many English majors participate in LSU Summer Programs Abroad or in exchange programs with universities in England, France, Ireland, and elsewhere.
Our majors go on to law school, secondary school teaching, graduate study, technical writing, teaching English as a second language (or as a foreign language abroad), publishing, communications, and various other careers requiring skillful reading, writing, and learning. English majors can choose among four overlapping but different concentrations: Creative Writing, Literature, Secondary School Education in English, and Writing and Culture.
Creative Writing at LSU is a vibrant literary arts community, offering a genre-flexible program of study designed for students who wish to engage in a dynamic exploration of the craft of creative writing. We prepare students for work in the literary arts, law, teaching, publishing, arts administration, writing for the entertainment industry, and other careers.
The Literature concentration emphasizes reading, interpreting, and placing imaginative literature in a variety of interpretive contexts.
The Secondary Education in English concentration prepares students for secondary school teaching, and includes courses taught in conjunction with courses from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
The Rhetoric, Writing and Culture concentration, focuses on a wide range of kinds of writing (e.g., writing a corporate budget, a newspaper, a novel, or a film script), studied on a range of levels, including linguistics (the systematic study of the components of language), rhetoric (the art of the effective and persuasive use of language), and cultural studies (encompassing all the socially transmitted assumptions and behaviors that affect a text). This concentration is associated with the 3 + 3 Pre-Law Program.
Browse the Department of English Collections:
1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era