Exploring English Programs at Columbia University: A Comprehensive Guide

Columbia University offers a range of undergraduate programs in English, designed to cultivate critical thinking, effective communication, and a deep appreciation for literature and language. These programs cater to diverse interests and career aspirations, providing students with a solid foundation for future success in various fields.

Bachelor of Arts in English: A Foundation for Diverse Careers

A Bachelor of Arts in English from Columbia University provides a transformative coursework and accomplished faculty and sharpens your skills in writing, research and critical analysis. The program in English fosters the ability to read critically and imaginatively, to appreciate the power of language to shape thought and represent the world, and to be sensitive to the ways in which literature is created and achieves its effects. The courses the department offers draw on a broad range of methodologies and theoretical approaches, from the formalist to the political to the psychoanalytical (to mention just a few). The literature emphasis explores a range of literary traditions to understand literary theory and how it emerges out of history and culture.

Curriculum and Focus

The English curriculum includes major and minor requirements designed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the field. Students can choose from various popular English classes, such as "Critical Approaches to Interpreting Texts," which explores a wide range of critical lenses for interpreting texts.

The major points to three organizing principles for the study of literature-history, genre, and geography. Recognizing traditional values in the discipline and reflecting its changing shape.

Career Prospects

With a bachelor’s in English, your options are endless-not just in advertising and media, but in marketing, public relations, non-profit settings and government agencies. English majors at Columbia College work in a variety of industries and settings. Graduates are well-prepared to develop written content for advertisements, books, magazines, journalism, blogs and other forms of media. Work for companies that rely on communication for marketing and public relations. Work in a non-profit setting to help charities convey their needs and services. Or work for governments and agencies that need to convey important messages to their constituents.

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A Bachelor’s degree prepares you for a rising career and for future graduate study by emphasizing clear communication, critical thinking, and a leading-edge understanding of your chosen field. Your solid foundation will make you a strong candidate for any graduate program.

Bachelor of Arts vs. Bachelor of Science

A Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science require slightly different coursework. A Bachelor of Arts allows you to take more classes in the humanities, specifically foreign language.

English Curriculum: Major & Minor Requirements

The English program offers a variety of options for students to tailor their studies to their interests.

Major & Minor Options

English, B.A. Major
Creative Writing Minor
English Minor
Writing Minor
Social Justice Literature Minor

Core Courses

The introductory course ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study, together with its companion seminar, ENGL UN2001 Approaches to Literary Study Seminar, is required for the English major, minor, or concentration. It should be taken by the end of the sophomore year. Fulfillment of this requirement is a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures.

ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study. Why does literature affect us as it does, why might you want to understand its history, strategies, and meaning, and how exactly do you go about that? This course won’t give you the answer, because there is no single answer. It will instead point the way toward the multitude of possible answers, giving you a variety of critical tools for exploring these questions, and deepening your powers as a thinker, reader, and writer. The course consists of weekly lectures by department faculty members (ENGL 2000) and small weekly seminars with advanced doctoral candidates (ENGL 2001). The lectures will introduce you to texts from across literary history and in various genres (poetry, drama, prose narrative, etc.), giving you an opportunity to learn from and get to know our renowned faculty members. The intimate seminar setting will give you an opportunity to delve further into these texts and techniques, debate their meaning with one another and an expert guide, and engage in exercises that advance your critical writing and interpretive skills, putting into practice what you’ve learned. You will encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty, your seminar leader, and the discipline at large, while learning to expand upon these approaches and make them your own. The course is required for English majors and minors (who should take it as early as possible in their Columbia careers), but it is for everyone: advanced students of literature or those new to literary study; committed majors or those still exploring; anyone seeking the excitement and immersion this course offers.

ENGL UN2001 Approaches to Literary Study Seminar. Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN2001 must also register for ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study lecture. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature, through a weekly pairing of a faculty lecture (ENGL 2000) and small seminar led by an advanced doctoral candidate (ENGL 2001). Students in the course will read works from across literary history, learning the different interpretive techniques appropriate to each of the major genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction). Students will also encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty and by the discipline at large, and will be encouraged to adapt and combine these approaches as they develop as thinkers, readers, and writers. ENGL 2000/2001 is a requirement for both the English Major and English Minor.

Electives

The department offers a diverse range of electives, including:

ENGL UN3892 BEOWULF. This course will primarily consist in the task of translating the remarkably challenging poem Beowulf. We will be reading (smaller) portions of the vast quantity of secondary texts as we negotiate and debate issues raised by our readings and contemporary scholarship. As we work through the language of the text, comparing translations with our own, we will also be tracking concepts.
ENGL UN3943 ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
ENGL GU4729 CANTERBURY TALES. (Lecture). Beginning with an overview of late medieval literary culture in England, this course will cover the entire Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. We will explore the narrative and organizational logics that underpin the project overall, while also treating each individual tale as a coherent literary offering, positioned deliberately and recognizably on the map of late medieval cultural convention. We will consider the conditions-both historical and aesthetic-that informed Chaucer’s motley composition, and will compare his work with other large-scale fictive works of the period.
CLEN GU4414 HIST OF LITERARY CRITICISM:PLATO TO KANT.
CLEN UN3125 Medieval Encounters. Though often thought of in mainstream culture as closed, conservative, and backwards, the medieval world was actually a place where the circulation of people and ideas resulted in generative encounters. This course will consider texts that brush up against the unfamiliar. We’ll read travelogues containing Western views of the East and Muslim views of Christian society, plus texts of questionable literary merit and difficult, artful poetry. Via our course readings, you’ll cross borders into strange lands with unaccountable customs, experience the possibilities of the marvelous, and interact with the afterlife and its denizens.
CLEN UN3725 Literary Guides to Living and Dying Well from Plato to Montaigne. Surrounded by friends on the morning of his state-mandated suicide, Socrates invites them to join him in considering the proposition that philosophizing is learning how to die. In dialogues, essays, and letters from antiquity to early modernity, writers have returned to this proposition from Plato’s Phaedo to consider, in turn, what it means for living and dying well. This course will explore some of the most widely read of these works, including by Cicero, Seneca, Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, Petrarch, and Montaigne, with an eye to the continuities and changes in these meanings and their impact on the literary forms that express them.
CLEN GU4750 Staging the Middle Ages: Medievalism and the Production of New Opera. The Middle Ages have long been a source of inspiration for composers of opera. Since the midnineteenth century, mystery plays, troubadour lyrics, enigmatic tapestries, and Arthurian romances have all been showcased on the operatic stage; the last 30 years, in particular, have seen a spike in interest in reenergizing medieval culture for contemporary audiences. Designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students interested in medieval literature and/or the history of lyric theater, this course excavates the medievalist turn in opera, from Wagner to the present day. We’ll ask questions about the nature of intermedial adaptation, the effect of staging in constructing or dispelling medieval allusion, the historically contingent politics of musical antiquarianism and revival, and the enduring appeal of the Middle Ages in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
ENGL UN1336 Shakespeare II. This course covers the second half of William Shakespeare’s career, attending to the major dramatic genres in which he wrote. It will combine careful attention to the plays’ poetic richness with a focus on their theatrical inventiveness, using filmed productions of many of the plays to explore their staging possibilities.
ENGL UN3444 Race, Religion, and Early Modernity. “Race and religion are conjoined twins. They are both products of modernity.”-Theodore Vial In this course, we will turn the clock back to early modernity, exploring the entanglement of concepts of racial and religious difference in the texts and cultural products of early modern England. Beginning in sixteenth century England, we will explore how a distinctive English Protestant identity was fashioned in relation to various religious and racial others, most notably the Jew, the Ottoman “Turk”, and the Black African. We will then turn to the literatures of encounter, exploring how the categories of race and religion were articulated in travel narratives, ethnographic accounts, and political polemic. Finally, we will turn to the writings of Afro-descended and Indigenous Christians, exploring how religious self-fashioning was performed by these racialized subjects. Seminar readings will primarily consist of primary sources from the period including poetry, prose and drama from England and, in the latter part of the semester, its colonies. These will be supplemented with a variety of textual and non-textual materials, including works of art, historical documents, period-specific scholarship, and contemporary theory.
ENGL UN2228 Staging Early Modern London. This lecture course examines the performances through which early modern London (c. 1558-1642) “staged” itself: at the public and private theaters, on the street in civic and royal rituals, and in popular entertainments. In so doing, we will examine how the capital city’s sense of itself came to be shaped by its various performances - its relationship with the crown, with the country, with strangers and foreigners - and how key sites (the “liberties,” the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall, the Thames, Covent Garden, Hyde Park) came to hold meaning for London audiences.
ENGL UN2933 Spenser. This course centers on the writing of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), early modern England’s self-styled national poet. We will devote much of our attention to The Faerie Queene, a complex intertwining of romance and epic that is Spenser’s major poetic achievement and the most important understudied work of the English Renaissance. Spenser himself referred to The Faerie Queene as an “endlesse worke” because he couldn’t finish it, but it’s also endless in the sense that it richly rewards deep study. The Faerie Queene envisions a world saturated with meaning, and the poem’s allegory is everywhere engaged with the challenges, dangers, and delights of interpreting it. We will enrich our simultaneous study of Spenser’s poetry and the culture of English early modernity by reading some of his shorter poems, including The Shepheardes Calender, his poetic debut, and the Amoretti, his sonnet sequence. We will supplement this work with a visit to Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which will highlight the literary, political, and cultural traditions on which Spenser’s work draws. We’ll also attend the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition on Tudor England, which will offer a glimpse of the royal iconography that Spenser’s writing both endorses and critiques. Finally, we will confront Spenser’s colonialist views as expressed in his View of the State of Ireland, a prose tract he wrote after serving as secretary to Arthur Grey, the architect of England’s brutal attempt to colonize Ireland in the 1580s.
ENGL GU4462 Gender and Resistance in Early Modern Literature. This class will focus on early modern literature’s fascination with the relationship between women, gender, and political resistance in the early modern period. The works we will read together engage many of the key political analogies of the period, including those between the household and the state, the marital and the social contract, and rape and tyranny. These texts also present multiple forms of resistance to gendered repression and subordination, and reimagine sexual, social, and political relationships in new and creative ways. Readings will include key classical and biblical intertexts.

Guidance and Support

Questions about coursework or program requirements can be addressed to the department’s Undergraduate Coordinator, to the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS), or to any member of the department’s Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE). The department’s director of undergraduate studies is the final authority on whether requirements for the major have been met. Students should fill out a Major Requirements Worksheet early in the semester preceding graduation. The worksheet must be reviewed by an adviser and submitted to 602 Philosophy before the registration period for the final semester.

The DAR is a useful tool for students to monitor their progress toward degree requirements, but it is not an official document for the major or concentration, nor should it replace consultation with departmental advisers.

Independent Study and Research Opportunities

Note that you cannot register for an independent study without official departmental approval.

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The Williams Fellowship supports summer research projects requiring foreign travel, with grants of up to $6000.00. The competition is open to any Columbia College junior majoring in English and Comparative Literature. Recipients of the award must undertake a significant piece of independent scholarship based on their research in the senior year - either as an independent study, or as part of the Senior Essay program.

The Humanities Research Scholars Program (HRSP) offers a select group of rising juniors at Columbia College the opportunity to pursue independent research projects and to develop analytical and investigative skills that will serve them well in any future endeavor. This program is designed to help students learn from one another as well as from leaders in the academic and professional world, and to support students in their intellectual pursuits and their future growth.

Developing Essential Skills

This program helps you develop a respect for humanistic and inclusive thinking. We cultivate strong critical reading and thinking skills alongside effective written expression. Learn the universal skills that all employers seek: written and verbal communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

Columbia University American Language Program (ALP): Enhancing English Proficiency

For students seeking to enhance their English language skills, Columbia University offers the American Language Program (ALP). The ALP provides intensive English programs designed to prepare students for academic success in the US university setting.

Program Highlights

Academic English: ALP courses focus on preparing students to study at university in the US. This includes essay writing, presentations, note-taking and discussions. But these skills are useful in other contexts too, such as the workplace.
Integrated skills: Each class focuses on more than one skill, which is a more natural way to learn a language.
Thematic learning: Grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation are best learned in context. In fall and spring semesters teachers explore many different themes to provide content for students to discuss and write about. In each summer project-based course, teacher explore many aspects of one main theme.
Error correction: Making errors is an important part of the learning process. We encourage as much spoken and written communication as possible, and provide plenty of feedback to help you become more conscious of your language, and to help you improve.
Team teaching: Each Intensive course is taught by two or three instructors, who work together to create courses specifically tailored to the students. Each teacher brings their own style and expertise, so learning is always varied.
Critical thinking: It’s not just about learning the language, but about learning to engage with themes and topics in individual ways. We teach you to be inquisitive and curious, and to really question what you see and read.
Authentic Materials: As soon as possible, we introduce as much authentic material as we can, from newspaper and magazine articles, to novels, plays, lectures, movies and music.

Levels

The ALP has eight levels of instruction, from pre-intermediate to high advanced. Important Note: The ALP does not teach beginners.

Summer Intensive Program

Summer courses are 4-weeks long. Each session is a separate course, with different materials and topics. Summer A begins in May, Summer B in June, and Summer C in July. You can study for 4 weeks (A, or B, or C), 8 weeks (A+B, or B+C), or 12 weeks (A+B+C). Summer Intensive program levels 3-9 follow a project-based curriculum. In each session, participants study academic skills and improve their English by exploring different aspects of one main topic. The work will lead to the creation of a written and spoken project that will be presented at the end of each course in a Project Fair. Level 2 follows a textbook-based curriculum.

Limited on-campus housing is available for ALP Summer students.

Eligibility

The ALP Intensive Program is open to any applicant aged 18 and older who has reached a pre-intermediate (CEFR A2) level of English proficiency.

Fees

Activity Fee: this covers expenses relating to orientation, handbooks, events and activities. Instructional Support Fee: this covers class materials and expenses such as playbooks, novels, newspapers, photocopying, theater tickets, museum or event entry. ALP Student Services Fee: this covers I-20 processing fees and other SEVIS transactions. Technology Fee: this covers SPS technology expenses, including access to online course management software, Canvas, and tools used to develop online course content. Health Insurance: All ALP students in Fall, Spring and 8 or 12 week Summer courses are required to have Columbia Medical Insurance. It is not possible to waive (= not pay) the Insurance charge unless you have comparable US health insurance. Visit Columbia Health for details. Health and Related Services Fee: All ALP students are required to pay the Health and Related Services Fee. This fee covers access to Columbia health services such as medical, counseling, wellbeing, sexual violence response and disability services. Books and Materials: this is an estimate. Instructors assign books at the beginning of the session and students must buy them. Students are not billed for textbooks. Estimated Living Expenses: this includes food, transportation, everyday expenses, and accommodation. This gives an idea of how much money is needed to live in New York so you can plan financially. Students are not billed for living expenses, except for any ALP/Columbia Housing. Estimated Total Cost of Study: When you apply for an I-20 you must show you have this total amount on your financial document. Immunization requirements: Please note. All Columbia students are required to be immunized for Measles Mumps & Rubella (MMR) before being registered for class - see Columbia's immunization requirements here.Note: not all fees are refundable if students withdraw from the program.

Accreditation

Columbia University American Language Program Intensive English Programs are accredited by the Commission on English Language Program Accreditation (CEA) for the period August 2019 through August 2029 and agrees to uphold the CEA Standards for English Language Programs and Institutions. For further information about this accreditation, please contact the Commission on English Language Program Accreditation, 1001 N.

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