Welcome to the Stanford University Department of English

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Congratulations, Class of 2024!

One of the founding departments of Stanford University in 1891, the English department is the cornerstone of the humanities at Stanford. The pioneer faculty of English was an eclectic group of writers, comparativists, and literary scholars.

Front entrance of the quad from Jordan Hall to Hoover Tower, on Serra Street. From a series of images intended to "recreate" historical images from the Stanford Archives. bicycle

 

Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service

Undergraduate Program

To study English is to master the power of language.

On the first day of summer, junior Chaz Curet takes a break to read in the sun. The English major found a comfortable spot in the SEQ to read from 'Our Story Begins,' a collection of short stories by Stanford professor Tobias Wolff.

Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service

Coterminal Master of Arts

If you are an advanced undergraduate who wants to take the study of literature to a higher level, then the coterminal M.A. program is for you.

Ato Quayson speaking with Ramon Saldivar and Paula Moya

Paul Keitz

Check out our courses

Stanford English offers a wide variety of interdisciplinary courses taught by world-class faculty

A photo of Ato Quayson and Adam Johnson attending the Creative Writing Welcome Back Dinner.

Views from the Department

Professor Ato Quayson with Professor Adam Johnson at the Creative Writing program Welcome Dinner

 

 

Recent News

Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade. by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, will be published April 15th. by Yale University Press, in their “Black Lives” book series (edited by David Blight, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jacquelyn Goldsby) Mark Twain’s Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self‑aware, and...
“A frank love letter to modern Jewish life.” — MERVE EMRE, contributing writer, The New YorkerAn intimate memoir in essays seeking familial history and personal memory against the backdrop of the lost world of North American Jewry.What is the past? How can we let it speak on its own terms, without forcing it into the categories of history? In The...
Congratulations to Professor Nicholas Jenkins for winning the 2024 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism for his book, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England!His book is available for purchase through Harvard University Press.

Upcoming Events

May
19
Date
Mon May 19th 2025, 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Location
Building 260, Pigott Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 260, Stanford, CA 94305
216

Beyond the Travel Narrative: Poesis, the Comparative and Global Literature

Nigel Smith (Princeton University)

RSVP…

May
20
Date
Tue May 20th 2025, 5:30pm - 6:30pm
Location
Building 460, Margaret Jacks Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 460, Stanford, CA 94305
Terrace Room

What if close reading—now at the center of the debates known as the “method wars”—was never simply a protocol or set of…

May
28
Date
Wed May 28th 2025, 12:00pm
Location
Building 460, Margaret Jacks Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 460, Stanford, CA 94305
Terrace Room (426)

What did Langston Hughes and W.E.B Du Bois have to say about race and blackness in two radically different moments in China when they…

Department Bookshelf

English remains a top-ranked department nationally because of the strength and variety of our faculty publications, both in scholarly research and creative writing. Browse the Bookshelf to explore our many interests.

 Browse the entire Bookshelf