The Department of English is a central part of the School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies within the College of Arts and Law; our partner department within the School is the Shakespeare Institute, based in Stratford upon Avon.
Studying English at Birmingham invites students to become experts in the core areas of the subject and to stretch their minds around its new ideas and practices. Ours is a strong department, with members of staff working in the fields of English Literature, English Language and Creative Writing; the most recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 2008 found that a full 60% of our research was of international excellence.
Literature staff in the department research, publish and teach across the full chronological range of English Literature from Old English to the present day, with a commitment to a rich diversity of theoretical, historical and intellectual approaches to their subjects.
Language staff too have an equivalently broad range of expertise in research, publications and teaching interests, their work spanning and continuing to extend many of the major approaches to the field. Birmingham is internationally famous for its work in Corpus Linguistics, brought together within the Centre for Corpus Research.
Creative Writing staff have interests in prose, poetry, drama and screen-writing, and their particular expertise in developing writing skills in others is shared by the department as a whole.