GUIDING PRINCIPLES

• As Villanova English majors, you will read, discuss, write about, and craft literature. In the process, we aspire for you to meet the following learning goals and objectives:

  • develop intellectual curiosity, cultural empathy, and a heightened capacity to understand different points of view.

  • become well-versed in an array of global literary genres in English, including those by Black, Africana, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian-American and Asian writers.

  • become attentive to the power of language, learning to identify and evaluate the aesthetic dimensions of literary and cultural forms, including how joy, beauty, and passion inform the history and practice of reading and writing.

  • cultivate your imagination and learn how to use various literary techniques and devices through the practice of creative writing.

  • explore challenging questions of human experience, including issues of social justice, and the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, environment, and faith.

  • employ the disciplinary vocabulary of English studies to interpret a wide variety of texts and assess their historical, cultural, and political contexts.

  • develop expertise in writing cogent, evidence-based arguments, expressed in clear, persuasive, insightful, and well-organized prose.

  • learn how to conduct research, consulting legitimate sources to advance your thinking and solve problems.

  • hone your capacity to listen carefully and speak effectively.

  • take part in internships and other departmental career opportunities that help you move from completing your English degree to pursuing a meaningful career and living a fulfilling life.

The English Department recognizes diversity as an imperative. Because diverse identities and ideas shape in complex ways the literary traditions we seek to understand and to teach, we cannot do justice to the texts we read without foregrounding diversity itself. We define diversity broadly, as the presence of difference among faculty and students and within course content, especially but not limited to race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, body style, age, ability, religious affiliation, and legal status.

Our approach builds upon the most influential developments in literary criticism in the last fifty years, which have featured a dramatic expansion of the literary canon beyond white male authors, the rise of multifaceted structures of analysis based upon evolving theories of identity and difference, and special attention to the history of subordinated subjects within national literatures. Diversity and its counterpart, inclusion, constitute an ethos and a set of principles that we can use to organize our teaching and our work with one another. Inclusion requires not merely that differences be present, but that we affirm those differences and oppose systems of oppression based on them. Rather than a goal to be achieved, we see diversity and inclusion as a process in which we must all be engaged. We can expect to make mistakes in our work to cultivate diversity, and we acknowledge that success requires us to remain committed to learning from each other and from our students. While we see demographic statistics—about our faculty, our students, and the authors and topics covered in our courses—as useful tools for measuring diversity, we also recognize that our commitment to diversity must go beyond them.