About Us

Inside the English Department at Case Western Reserve University, our students learn new ways to discover, examine and discuss a wide variety of stories and the ways they are shared. Then students are given the tools they need to find their own. The flexibility of the major allows students to specialize their studies based on their passions – from classic literature to graphic novels, from poetry to journalism — while exposing them to genres they may not have previously considered. Our small class sizes (most contain fewer than 15 students) allow individual instruction from professors who have, in the past decade, published dozens of books on a wide range of topics. Their work has appeared in prestigious research journals and popular publications including The New Yorker, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Our faculty has earned armloads of awards for teaching and scholarship including the Fulbright Scholar Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, the Nancy Dasher Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Daily Beast recently selected one of our classes as one of the top 20 college courses in the nation, and two of our professors recently earned the Carl F. Wittke Award for teaching, which is bestowed by students to two professors among the entire faculty. Through our active, dedicated alumni, renowned guest lecturers and relationships with nearby cultural institutions and publications including Cleveland Magazine and the student-led Case Reserve Review and Ars Poetica, students have numerous opportunities to write and learn outside the classroom. The English Department serves as a launching pad for a vast array of careers, from teachers to business executives, from lawyers to magazine editors, from doctors to documentary filmmakers. For more information, please visit our website or schedule an appointment to stop by for a tour to hear our story, and begin yours.