Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public research institution serving a richly diverse student body of fifty thousand students, including over twelve thousand graduate students. As both an AAU member and the public university of the nation's most densely populated state, Rutgers, as its president Richard McCormick said in his inaugural address, recognizes that the excellence it seeks can only be achieved by pursuing "ideals that have no bottom line except the enrichment of our species through the arts, humanities, and the sciences."

The English department at Rutgers-New Brunswick is central to the success of this mission to produce insights that enrich the lives of others. Our faculty are active leaders and participants in many of the university's strongest interdisciplinary research centers, including the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, the Center for Historical Analysis, and the Institute for Research on Women. At the undergraduate level, Rutgers English trains more than nine hundred undergraduate majors and more than two hundred active graduate students. It is also responsible for staffing the sole course required of all entering students, Expository Writing 101; through the composition requirement, Rutgers English provides gateway instruction in humanistic reading and writing practices to more than 11,000 students annually. Located at the hub of so much intellectual activity, Rutgers English plays a definitive role in shaping the character and quality of humanistic inquiry across the disciplines at the university.

Regularly ranked as one of the top twenty programs in the country, Rutgers English is recognized for having a faculty committed to pursuing historically-grounded, theoretically-informed research across the full span of literary production. We believe that the first responsibility of any English department is to promote the study of past and emerging literary traditions. We see this responsibility as best fulfilled by a faculty engaged in ongoing advanced research into the discipline's most central concerns. The faculty's commitment to this ideal is expressed in the Graduate Program's Literatures in English curriculum, which provides our graduate students with the intensive intellectual and professional training required to excel at working closely with literary texts, even as the methods, objects, and goals of such training are being redefined by globalization, technology, and profound shifts in student demographics. And this commitment is expressed, as well, in the wide-variety of our course offerings at the undergraduate level, which affords students the opportunity both to acquire a firm grounding in the literary canon and to explore the full range contemporary writing.

What is the future of English? Whereas fifty years ago the discipline largely understood itself as committed to the work of examining an established literary canon by British and American authors, the goal of English studies has now been redefined over the course of the Culture Wars to include the promotion of a wide range of political, theoretical, and historically-grounded reading practices which axiomatically raise questions about canon-formation and institutional legitimation. These developments have profoundly altered the discipline's required reading list and have created inviting learning opportunities for faculty and students alike to explore previously excluded or neglected forms of literary expression. Undergraduate and graduate students alike stand to benefit from working in a discipline so fully committed to the dual projects of self-expression and self-reflection.

Welcome,

 

Richard E. Miller
Chair, Department of English