From Beowulf to Blogging.  In the George Mason English Department you'll find in one place experts on the poetry of John Milton and the literature of the Middle East, folklorists whose studies reach from Mexico to Maine, film scholars of Hollywood and Bollywood, cutting-edge courses in digital writing, internationally renowned poets and novelists, authorities on successful rhetoric, writing and editing, and a linguist whose web-based archive records and analyzes the accented English of speakers of nearly 200 languages from around the world.

Though the offerings of the department are rich and wide, its faculty shares a single mission: to expand the fundamentally human capacities to speak, write and persuade, and to examine, imagine and create.

 Departmental Profile

• Undergraduate BA programs, including 14 concentrations, serve around 500 majors
• Virginia's first and only BFA in Creative Writing
• Graduate MA programs in Cultural Studies, Literature, Teaching of Writing and Literature, Linguistics and Writing and Rhetoric, and a PhD program in linguistics enroll more than 160 students
• Graduate MFA programs enroll more than 100 students
• Seven minor programs available
• Department teaches over 12,000 students annually in courses in composition and introductory literature

Scholarship

Faculty members have been well recognized for their scholarship and creative work, with numerous awards and fellowships, including

• Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
• Prizes such as the Florence Howe Award for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, the Grub Street National Book Prize, the Commonwealth Book Prize, Africa Region, the Library of Virginia Foundation Fiction Award, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, and the Indiana Review Annual Poetry Prize
• Faculty has published about 30 books over the past five years in presses including Rutgers University Press, W. W. Norton, University of California Press, Bedford/St. Martins, Sourcebooks, Palgrave, McGraw-Hill, Lexington, Ashgate, McFarland, Oxford, Anchor, University of Virginia, Gemmamedia, Ausable, and Ahsahta.

Teaching

• Faculty members have received a number of teaching awards, including eight Mason Teaching Excellence Awards and one David J. King teaching award
• Nationally ranked Writing Across the Curriculum Program, serving the Mason community
• Oversees the University Writing Center, serving the Mason community

Service/Community

Organizes Mason’s annual Fall for the Book Festival, a 5-day celebration of reading and writing with over 150 speakers and attendance over 20,000

Develops and hosts the Speech Accent Archive, which receives around 1 million hits monthly

Northern Virginia Writing Project collaborates with local K – 12 teachers to demonstrate successful teaching techniques and study research on the teaching of writing

Several faculty members serve on boards of literary foundations, notably the PEN/Faulkner Literary Foundation