Honors Program
The department’s honors program gives our seniors the opportunity to conduct intense and independent work in English literature and language. The program begins in the fall semester with an Honors Seminar, in which all honors students are required to enroll.
In the spring semester, each student completes an honors thesis, an extended paper on a topic of their own choosing. students work on the thesis in consultation with a faculty advisor. This is an excellent opportunity to pursue in-depth, independent research on a topic that has always interested you. Students who are in the creative writing track of the English major can choose to do either an extended scholarly or critical thesis or a thesis that consists of a collection of poems or short stories, or a more extended piece of fiction, creative non-fiction, or dramatic writing.
While the fall seminar is intended to prepare and focus students for the in-depth work of writing an honors thesis, the possible topics for theses need in no way be bound to the seminar topic.
All junior English majors are invited to apply by March 19, 2025.
Fall 2025 Honors Course
ENGL 396: Honors Seminar (Critical Approaches to Toni Morrison)
Wednesday 2-4:40 p.m.
Professor Jeffrey Tucker
This course introduces students to basic critical approaches to literature–including formalist, author-centered, reader-response, intertextual, and historicist approaches–utilized by professional literary scholars and provides opportunities to use those approaches to enhance and formulate their own interpretations. The featured primary texts will be the works of Toni Morrison, a towering figure in the traditions of American & African American literature, Nobel laureate, critical and commercial success, and a writer who did as much as anyone to shape how we study American literature now. Readings include Morrison’s novels (e.g. The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise), non-fiction writings (“Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” “The Site of Memory,” The Origin of Others), and short fiction (“Recitatif”). More generally, the course aims to develop students’ abilities to think critically about a text and to give expression to that thinking so that it can be shared with a community of readers. Requirements include weekly response papers, an in-class presentation on an article of literary criticism, an end-of-semester seminar paper, and class participation.