Explore the resources and career opportunities available through the English BA degree program! This four-year degree guides undergraduates towards developing new research and communication skills through reading, critiquing, and writing about literature and theory.

Mission and Goals

The Department of English at Loyola University Chicago seeks to promote the university's mission to encourage freedom of inquiry, the pursuit of truth and care for others through teaching, scholarship and service of the highest caliber.

In its teaching, the Department of English seeks to provide students with an education of the highest quality in the English language, in literature written in English and in critical and creative writing, judiciously combining breadth with depth, tradition with contemporaneity. It seeks to attract the best possible students from diverse geographical, professional, racial and ethnic backgrounds; it encourages minority and foreign applicants and those returning to school after an interruption of their academic lives. It encourages students throughout their programs so as to enable them to progress expeditiously to their degrees and to gain the maximum benefit from their experience.

Through the work of its faculty, the Department of English also strives to participate in and contribute to the wider community of scholarship, research and pedagogical theory and practice in the disciplines of literary and critical studies; in creative and critical writing; in comparative literature; in gender, ethnic and cultural studies; in teacher training; and in linguistics.

The Department of English also seeks to serve the larger university and greater Chicago community through public event programming, collaborative projects with secondary schools and other colleges and universities, and general assistance.

The Department of English operates four programs: the Writing Programs, Core Courses in English Language and Literature, the Undergraduate Major and Minor Programs, and the Graduate Programs. Specific goals for each of these programs follow. In order to achieve these goals at the highest levels of professional and intellectual accomplishment, the department seeks to recruit, support and retain the best faculty, and to foster academic freedom in teaching and research in ways that support the university's mission of producing knowledge in the service of humanity.

Writing Programs

• Develop in students' writing sound organization of thought, clarity in the structure of sentences and paragraphs, forceful, energetic prose and critical thinking; undergird the Writing Across the Curriculum Program in the undergraduate colleges; provide remedial instruction for those students who require it; and bring students with second language and dialect interference problems into the mainstream of standard written English
• Offer tutorial and collaborative aid at the LUC Writing Centers at Lake Shore and Water Tower Campuses to students from all colleges and levels of the university

Core Courses in English Language and Literature

• Introduce students to the study of literature by providing practice in careful, critical reading and developing in them a sense of the various contexts—biographical, social, political, etc.—that can enrich their understanding of a work
• Foster in students an appreciation and enjoyment of literature's aesthetic and intellectual elements
• Enhance students' perception of the richness and diversity of the social and ethical values in literature and our response to them, recognizing that literature is by its nature value-laden; that each author and reader brings to his or her work an ethical framework and vision of the human condition
• Enable students to transfer sensitivity to language and literary structure to their own writing, through a required writing component in each course
• Offer guidance and training in the writing of fiction, poetry and non-fictional prose

Undergraduate Programs

Undergraduate Policies and Procedures

Please see Undergraduate Policies and Procedures for academic policies that supersede those of academic units within the University.

English (ENGL)