English, Department & Faculty

The undergraduate program in literature considers poetic approaches to truth in the Western tradition by cultivating the study of lyric, narrative, creative, and rhetorical arts. Students explore how the best of the poets – broadly understood – envision nature and human experience, and how to express such insights with clarity, precision, and elegance.

A tradition of thought extending back to Milton, Sidney and Aristotle holds that literature imparts wisdom.

With respect to the kind of wisdom that governs human conduct, poetry promotes a grasp of reality superior to other ways of knowing in its combination of immediacy, lucidity, practicality, sensitivity to refinements, capacity to shape the affections, and adequacy to the whole.

Outdoor class on Paradise Lost

This conviction guides literary study at every level of the curriculum pursued at the University of Dallas. The program in literature provides a course of study in those authors who best exemplify the capacity of imagination to grasp truth. Teachers and students seek to learn what the best of the poets understand of nature and human experience.

In this mutual learning enterprise, students and teachers are related as beginning and advanced students of their common masters, the major imaginative writers.

After my first visit to UD in the spring of 2005, I came upon my friend and colleague, Alban Forcione, surely one of the five or fewer greatest scholars of Cervantes alive, [and told him] that we had wasted our lives teaching in the Ivy League and that I had found the place at which we could have spent our careers with better effect.
Robert Hollander, Princeton University Professor of European Literature and French and Italian, Emeritus

Where have recent UD English graduates attended graduate school? 

  • Master's, Education, Columbia University
  • Doctorate, Veterinary Medicine, Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine 
  • Master's, Philosophy, University of Dallas
  • Doctorate, Law, St. Louis University 
  • Master's, Literacy Studies, University of Stavanger 
  • Doctorate, English, Catholic University of America
  • Doctorate, JD, UNT Dallas College of Law
  • Master's, Education, Notre Dame University 
  • Master's, MBA, University of Dallas
  • Master's, English, Boston College
 

Where have recent UD English graduates been hired?

  • News Reporter, Times News
  • Chorus Member, Winspear Opera House
  • Copywriter, HeiProDigital 
  • Research and Policy Analyst, Drinker Biddle Reath 
  • English Teacher, Oakcrest School 
  • Paralegal, SIMS Lawfirm
  • Drill Sergeant, U.S Army 
  • Freelance Writer, Alabama Senator
  • Success Coach, The Learning House
  • Development Writer, AdjusterPro