Think and Do
Our faculty and students engage in wide-ranging research and scholarship that gives life a deeper, richer meaning. Our work enriches understanding, preserves cultures, fosters appreciation for that which forms us, shapes thought.
Research and Engagement
In the Department of English, both research and scholarship help us process the past, make sense of our lives, and imagine other worlds. Our authors, poets and scholars help us better understand and appreciate our very humanity.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Our faculty and students augment their creativity and imagination with cutting-edge technologies. Whether through digital humanities, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, film studies or any of a range of explorations into the spoken or written word, we look for meaning, and in the process, we find purpose.
Featured Research More Department News
Student Research
Students at all levels engage in meaningful research here. Undergraduates, master’s and doctoral students work alongside faculty mentors or pursue projects of their own. They participate – and win prizes – in the university’s research symposia for students. They travel to present their research at conferences across the state and nation. They contribute to books, and sometimes write their own. As a student of English, you will be challenged to hone your writing and communication skills, and encouraged to follow your passions through research and scholarship.
Publications
What the Dog Knows
Cat Warren, professor of journalism, teaches science writing, editing and reporting. In a completely different role, and working alongside the cadaver dog she trained, Warren also helps law enforcement officials search for missing and presumed-dead people.
In What the Dog Knows (Touchstone Books, 2013), Warren combines science, history and memoir to explore the world of working dogs that sniff out bodies, bombs and drugs, even unmarked graves of Civil War soldiers.
Fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry... our faculty are prolific writers. Here’s a short, short list of some of our faculty’s many, many books:
- Jason Miller, Langston Hughes: Critical Lives Series (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
- Thomas Phillips, Sine Wave (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019)
- Cat Warren, What the Dog Knows for Young Readers (Simon & Schuster, 2019)
- Robin Dodsworth (with Richard Benton), Language Variation and Change in Social Networks: A Bipartite Approach (Routledge, 2019)
- Allen Stein, Your Funeral is Very Important to Us (Main Street Rag, 2019)
- Jon Thompson, Notebook of Last Things (Shearsman, 2019)
- Wilton Barnhardt, ed. Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina (UNC Press, 2019)
- Belle Boggs, The Gulf (Graywolf Press, 2019)
- Marc Dudley, Understanding James Baldwin (University of South Carolina Press, 2019)
- Dorianne Laux, Only as the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2019)
- Erik Thomas, ed. Mexican American English: Substrate Influence and the Birth of an Ethnolect (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
- Christopher Crosbie, Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
- Jason Swarts, Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain: User Support in the Wild and the Role of Technical Communication (Utah State University Press, 2018)
- Barbara Bennett, Smoke Signals from Samarcand (University of South Carolina Press, 2018)
- John Morillo, The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660-1800: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin (University of Delaware Press, 2018)
- Elaine Orr, Swimming Between Worlds (Berkley, 2018)
- Bill Lawrence, The Punk and the Professor (Apprentice House, 2017)
- Jeff Reaser, Walt Wolfram (with Carolyn Temple Adger and Donna Christian), Dialects at School (Routledge, 2017)
- John Kessel, The Moon and the Other (Simon and Schuster, 2017)
- Paul Fyfe, Antony Harrison, David Hill, Sharon Joffe, and Sharon Setzer, Victoria’s Lost Pavilion (Palgrave, 2017)
- Marsha Gordon, Film is Like a Battleground (Oxford University Press, 2017)
- Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine and Motherhood (Graywolf Press, September 2016)
- Leila May, Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction (Routledge, 2016)
- Paul Fyfe, By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (Oxford University Press, 2015)
- Jason Miller, Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric (University Press of Florida, 2015)
- Rebecca Walsh, The Geopoetics of Modernism (University Press of Florida, 2015)
- Huiling Ding, Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic: Transcultural Communication about SARS (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014)
- Wilton Barnhardt, Lookaway, Lookaway (MacMillan, 2014)
- Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram, Talkin’ Tar Heel (UNC Press, 2014)
- Susan Katz, Start Your Career: Five Steps to Finding the Right Job After College (TIPS Technical Publishing, 2014)
- James Mulholland, Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730-1820 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)
- Elaine Orr, A Different Sun (Berkley/Penguin, 2013)
Hidden in the Text
English professor Tim Stinson is working with scientists to extract biological clues embedded in old books. Teaming up with bioarchaeologists, Stinson has collected structural proteins and DNA from the pages of medieval manuscripts.
Community Engagement
Young and Teen Writers
Workshops for Young and Teen Writers
Sponsored by the English Department and held on NC State's campus, these summer workshops nurture the creative spirit and teach creative writing skills and techniques.
We share our love of the written and spoken word – of literature, film, poetry, of rhetoric and dialects – with the world around us.
Our annual statewide poetry and fiction contests are among the largest in the southeast. And there’s no cost to participate.
Each summer, we hold writing workshops for teens and for younger aspiring writers.
We organize film series and host an exciting list of public readings throughout the year.