The English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

A Note from the Department Chair

Welcome to the Department of English at UNLV, which offers programs that are nationally recognized for their excellence.

Under the mentorship of our distinguished, prize-winning faculty, our undergraduate major toward earning the B.A. degree prepares students in the language disciplines of literature, writing, and rhetoric within a more ample education in the humanities. Students learn how to ask questions of books and the world as a means of appreciation. They learn to originate ideas, analyze and judge them, test and try them out with sharpening intellect, and how to formulate and express new thoughts in effective speech and prose. These skills are invaluable for virtually any profession in the 21st century, when capacities for clear communications, depth of intellect, and a profound knowledge of how to read both literature and culture are at a premium in our increasingly globalized world.

In addition to offering rewarding studies toward the B.A. in English, we serve the UNLV College of Education’s Certificate program for secondary school teachers. For the university, our Department provides vital core curriculum courses in Freshman Composition, World Literature, and Multicultural and International requirements. We’ve launched a Professional Writing Certificate program, and are building course offerings in Business and Technical Writing. In the near future, we hope to work in partnership for a universitywide platform for Writing-across-the-Curriculum that meets the needs of many academic disciplines.

Our M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degree programs are relatively new—as is our university— but we are proud to state that Graduate Studies in English have earned high rankings nationally, and, with the newly announced gifts of the Rogers Fellowships for the academic Ph.D. in its second year of admissions, and our Schaeffer Fellowship program for the Ph.D. with Creative Dissertation recently declared among “the top five” nationally by “The Atlantic”, plus our M.F.A. in Creative Writing International program rated among “the top five” in the category of “unique/innovative” programs, we believe Graduate Studies in English at UNLV are competitive with the best in the world. Our Department also houses and/or contributes to three journals of national reputation: “The Ben Jonson Journal,” “Interim,” and our students work actively with the Black Mountain Institute’s editing of the award-winning journal, “Witness.”

The English Department at UNLV is growing and thriving in all these vital language fields. Our faculty, students, and publications are winning prizes. We promise to continue to strive to be counted among the very best while at the same time reaching out to serve our greater community and city of Las Vegas—surely one of the most vital and dynamic settings for higher education anywhere. Welcome!

Douglas A. Unger, English Department Chair
douglas.unger@unlv.edu