Mission Statement
Someone once missed ten stops on a bus line because they couldn’t put the book down. Was that you? Or maybe you’ve whispered you’d kill to be able to write like Shelley, Didion, Morrison, or Rushdie. Don’t worry friend, we all say that, and because we do, we believe ours is the major for you.
We believe literature and language have the power to nurture, engage, delight, challenge, and connect us. The English Department at Grinnell fosters community through our shared love of literature across many global traditions and genres encompassing various aesthetic, theoretical, and cultural contexts. We cultivate critical thinkers, close readers, and skilled writers who are active participants in public discourse and well-prepared for a multitude of professions. To that end, we read, we write, reread, and write again. There’s no reason to put the book down.
Department Learning Outcomes
By the time students graduate, English majors learn to:
- Write scholarly and creative works on a substantial body of texts in English or that inform English language literary works.
- Analyze texts from a range of critical, cultural, and theoretical perspectives.
- Conduct independent research in the discipline.
- Write persuasively and elegantly in a variety of styles and genres.
- Practice revision to improve writing.
- Articulate the skills they have developed to multiple audiences beyond the College.
Outcomes approved Fall 2024; Webpage updated July 2025