The Department of English at New York University studies and teaches literature written in English from all periods and places. We are a large department, known for our broad view of the discipline, and understand "literature" to mean writing in all media, and its study to include all the ways in which texts have been produced, re-produced, circulated, and read, along with the modes of classification and the definitions of enjoyment used to understand them. The scholarly methods we employ, and in which we train our students, include close reading, cultural analysis, historical and archival research, literary and media theory, the history of the book, and digital humanities. The department awards B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in literature.
Professors in the English department are the recipients of many national and international awards including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. Members of the faculty provide intensive mentoring to students in the classroom and in office hours: beyond that the department hosts lecture series, film screenings, symposia, conferences, and colloquia in particular fields and subfields. Members of our large and lively graduate program organize reading groups in several areas; and we offer graduate certificates in medieval and Renaissance studies, and in poetics and theory. Our B.A. and M.A. students pursue careers in education, publishing, media, communication, and the arts, or go on to further study in graduate and professional schools; while recent recipients of our Ph.D have taken up faculty positions at schools including Berkeley, Brandeis, Macalester, Middlebury, Toronto, Tulane and Yale.