About Us

The Department of English at Illinois State University is dedicated to providing an environment that facilitates the individual and communal work—creative, intellectual, pedagogical, administrative, and outreach—of our faculty, staff, and students. Our long-term goal is to position ourselves as the premier English Studies program so that we can serve as an exemplar of the English Studies model to faculty and students nationwide.

In English Studies multiple and interdisciplinary perspectives are used to examine and produce texts for audiences communicating in English: how do cultures shape language and how does language shape culture; how do intersections of cultures affect communication across borders; what forms can we create to connect and enter into dialogue with each other? Children's Literature, Composition, Creative Writing, English Education, Linguistics, Literary and Cultural Studies, Publishing and Textual Studies, Rhetoric, Technical Communication, and TESOL offer our community of students and researchers the means of examining how we teach, learn, and understand ourselves and others through the stories we tell and the ways in which we tell them.