Mark Schoenfield, Undergraduate Director

Contact
• Mark Schoenfield
• 615-322-6527
• 327 Benson

Polly Case, Undergraduate Program Assistant
(615) 322-6527

A message from the Director of Undergraduate Studies:

Welcome to the English Department web-page. Vanderbilt’s English Department has been in the business of training tomorrow's leaders in a variety of fields for many years. Our graduates have gone on to earn degrees in medicine, law, business, and journalism as well as advanced degrees in either creative writing or English language and literature. Whatever field they eventually pursue, however, our majors enter their chosen career with carefully honed skills in analytic reading, writing, and argumentation. They can claim a thorough education in the English literary tradition. In addition, the department's increasingly interdisciplinary and transnational focus enables majors to become conversant with non-western literary texts and traditions. Beyond teaching a body of literary works, the department's courses aim to give our students sophisticated skills in literary and cultural analysis -- skills that equip them well for a lifetime of ongoing education. We offer a broad array of freshman writing courses. Recent examples include: “Love and War” “Introduction to the Sonnet” “Hypertext: Reading and Writing Online” “Existential Fictions” “The Simple Art of Murder: Knowledge and Guilt in Detective Fiction” “Reading Jane Austen” “Writing Lives: Autobiography and Case History” “New York, New York: Literature and Film.” Our majors put together programs by taking both broad survey courses on the English literary tradition and more specialized seminars on particular literary problems or movements. Recent examples of our regular course offerings: “Shakespeare and Film” “African American Women Writers” “Star-Crossed Lovers” “Literature of the Caribbean” “Revenge Tragedy” “History, Memory, Narrative” “American Masculinities” “The Rhetoric of the Body: Ovid and the English Renaissance” “The Politics of Identity in Latino/ Latina Literature” “Law and Literature” “Shakespearean Sexualities” “American Literature and Consumer Culture” “Genetics in Literature, Film, and Media”