Welcome
The Rice English department offers the B.A. and the Ph.D. One of the largest departments at Rice, it is nonetheless small enough to foster a sense of community where faculty are aware of and invested in the intellectual development of students as they proceed through its programs. A large and active speaker program encourages students at all levels to explore issues of interest to them outside the context of the classroom. The undergraduate English major is designed to produce sophisticated and knowledgeable readers of texts from a variety of historical periods and cultural traditions in the Anglophone world. English majors engage substantively not only with literary texts but also with criticism and theory, and with the methodologies that define our discipline and put it into conversation with others. The graduate program in English emphasizes, through its curriculum and its advising structure, students' ability to shape their own research program and to define the parameters of their intellectual work. We are committed to facilitating the development of self-motivated and professional scholars capable of original research at the highest level.