English

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Department of English

1500 N. Warner St. #1045
Tacoma, WA 98416-1045

Wyatt 335

Interim Chair

Tiffany Aldrich MacBain

253-879-3279

tamacbain@pugetsound.edu

Administrative Support Coordinator

Rutie MacKenzie-Margulies

253.879.2394

rmackenziemargulies@pugetsound.edu

Program Description

How do we evaluate and interpret the stories around us, and what is at stake in our choices? If narrative is understood to reflect and shape our world, experiences, and beliefs, how does it do so, and what kind of creative and critical thinking does it inspire? How does language—both literary and non-literary—order and reorder our perceptions?

The study of English at Puget Sound engages such questions analytically and artistically. Literature courses range from the classic to the contemporary, and include multiple perspectives of identity, place, and culture. Creative writing workshops develop the crafts of poetry and fiction, as well as non-fiction forms such as journalism and the personal essay. Seminars in media and non-literary analysis explore film, critical theory, true crime, and linguistics, while our writing internship course connects the skills you learn in our classrooms with local businesses seeking writers, analysts, and editors of print and digital media.

Ranging in focus from close textual analysis to hands-on experiential learning, from creative portfolio development to interdisciplinary historical and theoretical approaches, our curriculum prepares students for a wide variety of career paths.

See what some of our English alumni have been up to since graduating.

Who You Could Be

Editor, publisher
Attorney
Journalist
Digital marketing strategist
Professor, teacher
Communications director
Screenwriter
Research analyst

What You'll Learn

To read perceptively and critically
To write with clarity and sophistication
To speak persuasively and from a position of knowledge

Alumni

Matt Folensbee ’16

"Studying English made me a more persuasive writer, critical reader, and creative thinker; along with that, engaging with the lived experience of diverse writers gave me two of the most transportable skills a person can have: self-awareness and an ability to empathize with others."

SAMPLE COURSES

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ENGL 199 Crosscurrents Review

Participation in Crosscurrents, the student literary and visual arts magazine, requires reading manuscripts, discussing submitted work, and collaboratively selecting the literature and visual art work that will appear in each semester's issue. Required weekly meetings also involve active promotion and publicizing of Crosscurrents and managing the Crosscurrents organization as a whole.

ENGL 206 Literature by Women

This course for non-majors examines the work of women writers anywhere from the Medieval Period to the present, with attention to the historical and cultural context of texts. It asks such questions as the following: what are the canonical issues that arise from a study of women's literature? Is women's literature different from literature by men in some essential way? What forces have worked against women writers and what strategies have they often employed to make their voices heard? How have those strategies shaped the literature that women have produced?

Code

Artistic and Humanistic Perspectives

ENGL 229 Introduction to Creative Nonfiction

Combining seminar and workshop formats, the course introduces students to creative nonfiction, a genre of writing that is simultaneously intensely personal and engaged with the world of the writer; that borrows from lyrical strategies of poetry and narrative strategies of fiction; and that draws on popular forms of writing and journalism. Students read classic examples of creative nonfiction and write several nonfiction essays of their own, each of which goes through revision for a final portfolio. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.

Code

Artistic and Humanistic Perspectives

ENGL 237 American Literature and Culture: Beyond Borders

This introductory course engages with developments in American literary history that precede, complicate, or challenge nationalist frameworks. It focuses on the U.S. nation and/or its colonial antecedents through a lens that is transnational or multinational, considering the space we now identify as "America" (U.S) in relation to a variety of identities, traditions, and cultures that have circulated within and around it. The course thus emphasizes an anti-exceptionalist approach to American literature, focusing instead on the circulation of ideas about or in relation to the American U.S. within larger cultural or global contexts. Specific periods and themes vary according to instructor from the colonial era to the present, and may include comparative colonial or imperial literatures, trans-Atlantic traditions, and America in its various international, multi-national or post-national contexts. Course sub-topics might include but are not limited to the following: Anglo-American literary relations, narratives of colonization, Caribbean-American contexts, the Atlantic slave trade, U.S.-Mexico or hemispheric relations, literatures of transnational or international migration, the U.S. in a global world.

Code

Artistic and Humanistic Perspectives

ENGL 242 Introduction to Native American Literature

This course is a survey of Native American literature from beginnings to the contemporary moment. Students gain awareness of tribal distinctions and points of critical and socio-political concern within the field of study.

Code

Artistic and Humanistic PerspectivesKnowledge, Identity, and Power

ENGL 346 Jane Eyre and Its Afterlives

This course is concerned with the endurance of the "Jane Eyre" story (itself an elaboration of the Cinderella myth). Beginning with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), students examine a variety of stories, novels, and films that rework aspects of Brontë's vision. Students study the context of each revision and its commentary on the original text and examine shifts in the critical and feminist reception of these texts. Texts vary, but are selected from the following: Braddon, Gissing, James, Woolf, Forster, du Maurier, Rhys, Kincaid, Balasubramanyam, Winterson. Students produce both creative and analytic work.

Code

Artistic and Humanistic Perspectives

English Department Word Stock event — Each spring, the department hosts Word Stock, where graduating seniors are honored, several annual awards are presented, and winners of annual departmental writing contests in poetry, essay, and fiction are announced.

English field trip to Port of Tacoma — Members of Prof. William Kupinse’s Literature and Environment (ENGL 374) and Advanced Poetry Writing: Poetry and Environmental Justice (ENGL 328) classes participated in a field trip to the Port of Tacoma, where they were joined by local filmmaker and environmental activist John Carlton.

Sloan Strader '18 presents her summer research project at the fall symposium. — Sloan Strader ’18 presents her project at the Summer Research Symposium. In "Diary of a White Ally in the Pacific Northwest," Strader examined the journals of Tacoma artist Abby Williams Hill as they relate to Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute in order to gain a better understanding of how Hill supported the black community.

Cody Chun '17 presents at the fall summer research symposium. — Cody Chun ’17 presents his project at the Summer Research Symposium. In "Belief and Neo-Realism: Post-Postmodern Ethics and Metaphysics," Chun examines the metaphysical assumptions underpinning Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and the discursive response to the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.

Experiential Learning

English students intern as writers for local businesses while earning credit towards their B.A.; pursue independent research through competitive summer grants; study abroad in Copenhagen, Dublin, London, and Taiwan; serve on the editorial team of our in-house literary journal, Crosscurrents; do off-campus public poetry readings; present their work at our annual end-of-year celebration; and earn credit by joining “Events in English,” a planning committee that builds community through social gatherings for English students and faculty.

Recent experiential opportunities for English students have included:

Summer independent research grants, supervised by English faculty: Rowan Baiocchi '25 ("Body Horror and the Rage of the Transgender Experience"), Miles Cruger '25 ("Archival and Witness Ecopoetics: Space and People in the Face of Environmental Catastrophe"), Aurora Schneider '25 ("Action Through Inaction: A Deep Dive Into Dissociative Feminist Literature")
Internships through our ENGL 397 Writing Internship course: Henry Rohmer ’22 (content writer for ecomadic, a sustainable tourism magazine), Navi Esparza ’22 (film analyst and writer for Katch Entertainment), and Olivia McSweeny ’24 (content writer for Green and Prosperous)
Editor-in-Chief positions: Andrew Ellison ’24 and Maia Nilsson ’24 (Crosscurrents Magazine, hosted by the English Department)
Event Coordinator: Mary Borgerding ’25, for ENGL 197 Events in English

Stories

Students

Not Just Another Coming-Out Story

As a first-year student in Ann Putnam’s Introduction to Creative Writing course, English major Daniel Pollock ’22 was given an assignment to write about a memory or a moment he thought he had forgotten. Not only had the memory…

Campus

Faculty

University of Puget Sound announces faculty appointments to endowed positions

The Office of the Provost has announced appointments of four endowed professorships starting in fall 2022. The multiyear positions represent some of University of Puget Sound’s 10 endowed professorships, which support…

Why Stories Matter

“Stories matter. Stories are a reflection of power.” When Alicia Garza, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, said this during her keynote address at the close of the 2018 Race & Pedagogy National Conference…

Where Graduates Work

Where our graduates work:

Hulu (Release Communications Manager)
Concur Technologies (Sr. Global Product Communications Manager)
King County Department of Public Defense (Lawyer)
Niantic (Technical Program Manager)
University of Washington Libraries (Assessment and Data Visualization Librarian)
Premier Media Group (Writer)
Portland Ovations (Director of Sales and Marketing)
Tacoma Public Schools (Teacher)

Where Graduates Continue Studying

Where our students continue their studies:

Cambridge University (archaeology)
Oxford University (computer science)
Stanford University (literature)
University of Michigan (law)
Northwestern University (journalism)
George Washington University (anthropology)

Meet Our Faculty

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John Wesley

Professor and Chair, English

jwesley@pugetsound.edu

Early modern English literature is the primary focus of Prof. Wesley's research and teaching. He teaches courses on Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible as literature, and the history of the English language.

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Julie Christoph

Professor, English

jchristoph@pugetsound.edu

Prof. Christoph focuses her research on how personal identities are transmuted through the lenses of language and literacy. She teaches courses on literacy and culture, rhetoric, and composition.

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George Erving

Professor, Humanities and English and Susan Resneck Pierce Professor of Humanities and Honors

gerving@pugetsound.edu

In order to examine how literary arts advance ideas about the self, Prof. Erving researches British Romantic period history and literature. His courses focus on European intellectual history and English literature.

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Priti Joshi

Professor, English and Susan Resneck Pierce Professor of Humanities and Honors

pjoshi@pugetsound.edu

Prof. Joshi's teaching and research both focus on 19th-century British literature and culture, as well as postcolonial literature and film. Her courses include material on Dickens, Bollywood, and gender studies.

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William Kupinse

Professor, English

wkupinse@pugetsound.edu

Prof. Kupinse's current research focuses on early 20th-century environmental thought and its relationship to modernist literature. His classes include topics such as ecocriticism, creative writing, and British and Irish modernism.

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Tiffany Aldrich MacBain

Professor and Interim Chair, English

tamacbain@pugetsound.edu

Prof. MacBain teaches and researches 19th-century American and Native American literature. She focuses on the writings of women, both in memoir and diary form.

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Alison Tracy Hale

Professor, English

ajtracy@pugetsound.edu

A widely published scholar and author, Prof. Hale focuses her research in early American literature, with emphasis on the American gothic, the early novel, pedagogical practices, and the early Republic.

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Laura Krughoff

Associate Professor, English, and Director, Gender and Queer Studies

lkrughoff@pugetsound.edu

While working on both fiction and essay writing, Prof. Krughoff's scholarly and teaching interests include law and literature, the history of marriage, and the representation and effects of marriage equality.

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Regina Duthely-Barbee

Associate Professor, English

rduthely@pugetsound.edu

Prof. Duthely specializes in black feminist culture and digital rhetoric. Her work has been presented at a variety of conferences, and her courses focus on rhetoric, writing, language, and power.

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Laura Behling

Professor, English

lbehling@pugetsound.edu

Prof. Behling's interests are in late 19-century through 21st-century literature of the U.S., as well as literature and medicine, the health humanities, journalism, and science writing.

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FACILITIES

ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Collins Memorial Library has more than 500,000 volumes, as well as the Archives and Special Collections area, which includes manuscripts, rare books, and more.

MAKER SPACE

Located in Collins Memorial Library, the Makerspace allows Puget Sound community members to make, create, collaborate, learn, and share.

RAUSCH AUDITORIUM

Rausch Auditorium is the site of a variety of presentations and events, including Campus Films screenings, the Entrepreneurship Summit, classroom presentations, and more.