Welcome from the Chair

We are made up of literary and language scholars, linguists, and creative writers

Welcome to the ETSU Department of Literature and Language. Our department is made up of an exciting group of faculty dedicated to engaging with students through on-site and online courses, pursuing new avenues of scholarship, and serving the university.

Photograph of full-time faculty and staff from fall 2023

Our faculty is made up of literary and language scholars, linguists, and creative writers. Our interests range from Western and Eastern literatures and languages to regional and comparative literature, Appalachian studies, film and media studies, mythology, linguistics and ESL, composition studies, writing across the curriculum, technical and professional writing, computer-assisted writing, environmental writing, and creative writing.

We regularly publish books, book chapters, articles, reviews, poems, short stories, novels, and electronic media in areas as diverse as our interests and as comprehensive as our curriculum. Our commitment, as individual scholars and as a working faculty, is to the ideals that have led to ETSU's designation by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a doctoral-level, research-intensive institution.

Our commitment to international education serves an important goal of the University. Along with offering courses in French, German, Greek, Japanese, Latin, and Spanish, our faculty lead study abroad programs in Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Japan, and Spain.

The Department of Literature and Language offers the Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in English as well as the Bachelor of Arts degree in Foreign Language with concentrations in German, Japanese, and Spanish. We offer minors in Applied Spanish, Classical Studies, Creative Writing, English, Film and Media Studies, French, German, Japanese, Linguistics, Spanish, Technical and Professional Writing, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

We provide courses to support programs and minors in other departments, including Appalachian Studies, Black American Studies, Environmental Studies, and Religious Studies. In addition to the traditional Master of Arts in English, we offer a graduate certificate program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

We provide our students with opportunities to continue learning beyond the classroom and opportunities to professionalize by funding graduate students to present their work at conferences. We host the Southern Appalachian Student Conference on Literature (SASCOL), ETSU Celebrates Creative Writing, and the biennial Milton Marathon. Each year, our M.A. students who have received G.A. appointments teach some of our beginning composition courses. Students are provided unique opportunities to grow as writers and editors through the student creative writing journal The Mockingbird and the bi-lingual newspaper El Nuevo Tennessean. Experience in interpretation and translation is made possible by our department’s Language and Culture Resource Center (LCRC), which connects students to non-English language communities. Through the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English programs, our department offers internships for students to give back to the community and work in fields they may pursue upon graduation. Additionally, we offer several scholarships and merit awards for students pursuing English, Foreign Languages, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.