Welcome to the Department of English

With small, interactive classes from award-winning faculty, we offer undergraduates a liberal arts experience at a large, public, research university. If you are passionate about literature, poetry, popular culture, film, or the craft of writing, come see what the English Department has to offer. We offer certificates in journalism and creative writing, a minor in global film, and many opportunities to experience literature in the community through Exhibit X, Poetics Plus, the Buffalo Film Seminars, the Creely Lectures, and the BABEL Reading Series.   

Our graduate program is one of the most flexible and innovative in the country. We take particular pride in our Poetics Program, our Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, and our working groups in everything from British modernism to ecocriticism. Our award-winning faculty is well-known nationally and internationally, and our graduates hold positions at a wide range of universities, colleges, publishers, and non-profit organizations.

Our faculty teach approximately 80% of majors classes and 90% of 300 and 400 level courses, offering a great diversity of classes in traditional fields of English and American literature as well as in world literature, film, journalism, and creative writing. Students also have the opportunity to work with faculty on original research projects. Our major is rigorous, yet flexible, in its requirements.

Our PhD and MA Programs are among the most open, flexible, and innovative in the country. Students pick and choose from a wide range of seminars in such fields as American and British literature, film, psychoanalysis, popular culture, cultural studies, poetics, and critical theory. We value this variety as essential to a course of graduate study that engages equally with tradition and with change, whether it be in terms of developments in intellectual inquiry or changes taking place in the academy as a whole. Our graduate students become innovative scholars and teachers of literature and culture.