ENGLISH & FINE ARTS
Choose to study English. Equip yourself with curiosity, charisma, and an insatiable appetite for questioning. Work alongside English teachers who are guides, curators, and creators. Learn complementary and contradictory ways of navigating literature and the world. Challenge yourself. Sound educated. Live with grit and serendipity. Navigate archives. Step into imaginative worlds. Realize that you are hurling through the universe at 67,000 miles an hour on a heaping mass of magma. Your humanity isn’t something to be squandered.
As an English major, you will immerse yourself in ambiguity, subjectivity, poetry, industry, the Greeks and the geeks, truth, pain, loss, criticism (and all the other –isms embedded therein), imagination, memory, art, rhetoric, love, pity, joy, despair, philosophy, war, identity, race, colonialism, food, politics, technology, high and low culture, gender, senses, myth, cycles of the moon, grief, wanderings, getting lost, death, and the general feeling of being cast aside like a quick-stop Styrofoam coffee cup on the interstate. Or if lists aren’t your thing, you will pause, pay attention, and let the world intrude.
Let others chase the glitterings of the here-and-now like a herd of cats chasing mirrored lights on the ground. Your interests reside elsewhere. Feast at the banquet of Homer and, just as eagerly, devour the works of Alice Munro, Ralph Ellison, Cormac McCarthy, and Leslie Marmon Silko! Declare English now.
Academic Year 2020-2021 Courses
Icarus – Cadet Journal of the Arts
English Major Class of 2020 Independent Capstone Research Projects
Capstone Director: Dr Nicole Jerr
| Student | Capstone Project Title | Faculty Advisor | Second Reader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manzi Masozera | “There is No Law for Them Anyhow: Poems on an American Anti-Hero” | Greg Laski | Tom McGuire |
| William Patrick Newman | “Genuinely Afraid: Miller, Albee, and the American Dream” | Mark Kaufman | Marc Napolitano |
| Sarah Schwartz | “What is Really Lurking Underneath the Ocean? Uncovering Humanity’s Subconscious through the Exploration the Ecogothic in Poe and Lovecraft” | Daniel Couch | Amy Cooper |
| Connell Swenson | “Melville’s Adam: Antinomianism and Community in Clarel” | Steven Olsen-Smith | Richard Johnston |
| Renae Wilson | “The Pursuit of Innocence: The Human Narrative in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz” | David Buchanan | Ross Gresham |
| Karlee Xander | “Jesmyn Ward’s Singular Adolescent vs Multi-First Person Narratives” | Sarah Nance | José Antonio Arellano |
| Taylor Yucus | “Penning Presidential Idiolects: Literary Influence in the Bush and Obama Administrations’ Idiolects and Policies” | Melody Pugh | Gary Mills |
SUGGESTED COURSE SEQUENCE
| 4th CLASS YEAR (FRESHMAN) | 3RD CLASS YEAR (SOPHOMORE) | 2ND CLASS YEAR (JUNIOR) | 1ST CLASS YEAR (SENIOR) |
| Beh Sci 110 Chem 100 Com Sci 110 English 111 Engr 101 For Lang 1 For Lang 2 History 100 Math 141 Math 142 Physics 110 |
Chem 200 Econ 201 English 241 English 342 Engr Mech 220 Law 220 MSS 200 Physics 215 Pol Sci 211 Sys Opt Geo 310 |
Aero Engr 315 Beh Sci 310 ECE 315 English 343 English 344 English 390 English Opt English Opt English Opt English Opt Math 300 Philos 310 |
Academy Opt Astro Engr 310 Biology 215 English 353 English 411 English 490 English Opt English Opt History 300 Mgt 400 MSS 451 |
For full program requirements and course descriptions, download the current Curriculum Handbook.
POTENTIAL JOB ASSIGNMENTS
When you major in English at the U.S. Air Force Academy, you prepare yourself to join a long line of leaders throughout history. Our majors serve as pilots, navigators, missile officers, intelligence officers, maintenance officers, personnel officers, communication officers, and in many other fields. Some receive advanced degrees in English and return to the Academy as faculty members.
Majoring in English also prepares you for life beyond the Air Force. English was the course of study of Michael Eisner, former CEO of the Disney Corporation; General Martin Dempsey, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; Eric Shinseki, former Secretary of Veteran Affairs; Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; and many other leaders in every sector of industry and public life.
VALIDATION AND TRANSFER CREDITS
We offer validation and transfer credit for English 111 (Introductory Composition and Research) for the following:
- AP score of 5 (on Language/Composition or Literature/Composition)
- IB score of 5+ (at HL level)
- A- or higher in a comparable English composition course at an accredited four-year college or university
- A- or higher in an English composition course at an accredited two-year college AND also scored exceptionally well on the verbal component of the SAT or ACT exam (700+ SAT or 30+ ACT)
The Academy registrar receives text scores directly from the College Board. If your scores don’t make it, contact the English 111 course director.
College courses that are taught in a high school and given concurrent credit do not qualify for transfer credit. We only award transfer credit for courses that include a variety of written genres, instruction in argumentation and a significant research paper. We will check transcripts submitted to Academy to determine whether cadets meet these requirements. Once the academic year begins, if a cadet feels that he or she was eligible for transfer credit but has not received it, he or she should bring relevant documents (college transcript, course description, and in some cases standardized test scores) to the English 111 Course Director.
CONTACT US
Kathleen Harrington, Colonel, USAF
Permanent Professor and Head
Department of English & Fine Arts
(719) 333-3930
Thomas McGuire, Ph.D
Associate Professor, Deputy for Human Resources
Department of English & Fine Arts
Thomas.McGuire@usafa.edu
Brittney Szempruch, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English and Advisor-in-Charge
Department of English & Fine Arts
Brittney.Szempruch@usafa.edu