First-Year Focus
Members of Professor Jay Grossman’s BIG BOOKS first-year seminar, holding BIG BOOKS and celebrating their reading of more than 1000 pages in one quarter: both Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Welcome Northwestern Class of 2029!
We’re Northwestern’s home for American, British, and global literatures in English, as well as Creative Writing. We hope you’ll explore your passion for literature, words, and language with us.
You can explore our full year of courses here. English courses designed for first-year students include a variety of College and First-Year Seminars, as well as introductory courses that begin at the 200-level.
Why study English?
Words and stories surround us. We’re immersed in them. Novels, poems, stories, plays, films—but also Instagram posts, websites, and blogs. And, even more intimately, thoughts. We think in language, and its vocabularies and sentence patterns and metaphors and storylines structure our thoughts and help to determine what we think. Studying English at Northwestern means figuring out how words do the things they do and tell the stories they tell – in part so that we can write new stories if the ones we are living in and thinking with now don’t seem to be working.
Being a Literature Major at Northwestern means reading literature that’s been circulating across more than 1000 years of history and nearly all the continents of the globe. It means learning whole new ways of critical thinking about the work that literature does in the world, since writing doesn’t merely reflect the worlds it comes from, but also helps to shape those worlds. Even when you re-read familiar works, you’ll ask whole new sets of questions about them, and write about them in a whole new way. Our intro courses allow you to see the “big picture” in literature, across time and geography, and our more advanced courses help you zoom in on particular exciting themes and ideas. We promise that this won’t be high school English.
Being a Creative Writing Major at Northwestern means gaining a deep background in the literary tradition, since every good writer is also a good reader. But it also means learning the ins and outs of peer critique and work-shopping, finding ways to accept and give constructive criticism and sharing the insights of your reading. After all, if you already know what you’re doing before you do it, why bother doing it? The creative writing major stresses craft and technique, with the understanding that the discovery in writing creatively is intimately related to the discovery in reading.
An English major prepares you for virtually any career you can imagine. Top employers for our recent graduates range from Buzzfeed and the Washington Post to Deloitte, Google, and Teach for America. In the last few years, our graduates have also gone on to virtually every kind of professional school—business, law, medicine, education, public policy—and have pursued graduate studies in literature and other disciplines at some of the best universities in the world. English majors learn to read closely, write clearly, research effectively, and think both analytically and creatively – skills that are applicable anywhere words are at work.