Department of English

At Howard University, the Department of English is both careful and deliberate to reveal to our students that the base of all writing and literary traditions is one to which they are ancestral and cultural heirs and that these Africana inscription systems and literatures indeed nurture us all. From the oldest known book, The Instructions of Ptah Hotep (found in ancient Kemet or Egypt) to the latest novel of our most distinguished alumna, the late Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate, Global Icon, Alumna, the production of literary art (and our approach to it) reminds us that available to us at our fingertips (whether through acts of reading or writing) is a world of knowledge and awareness, of creation and inspiration.

At the heart of the Department, undeniably, is its faculty, one that is uniquely as committed to teaching as it is to research and publishing. Leading scholars and creative writers specializing in diverse range of topics occupy offices in Locke Hall; and on any given day of the week, these same scholars can be seen positioned at the front of a classroom or sitting among their pupils in a semi-circle bearing witness to and about the literary traditions that they breathe life into and that have breathed life into them. 

 Indeed, ours is an extraordinary faculty, one like no other in its willingness to teach solidly and to publish prominently.

Our students range from traditional lovers of literature to soon-to-be, well-prepared law students; hopeful public-school teachers or future literature professors. During any given semester, students have the option of studying African American, American, British, and Caribbean literatures as traditional survey courses or of taking special topics in literary theory and studies courses on Black British literature or Literature across Cultures. 

They join the ranks of luminary alumni, including literary critics Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Cheryl Wall; and published authors Zora Neale Hurston and Ta-Nehesi Coates, Writer‐in‐Residence and Sterling Brown Chair in the Department of English (pictured here).