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.

SAMPLE COURSES

• Creating Meaning: Introduction to Digital Literatures/Digital Arts
• Contemporary Literature: The Short-Story Cycle
• Race, Difference, and Monstrosity from Frankenstein to Native Son
• William Faulkner and W.E.B. DuBois: Civil Rights Between Literary History and Historiography
• American and Anglophone Literary Modernism
• Women’s Combat Literature: Real and Fictitious Women Who Push Boundaries in War

SUGGESTED COURSE SEQUENCE

For full program requirements and course descriptions, download the current Curriculum Handbook.

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

Ashley Christ, Capt, USAF
Instructor, Deputy for Human Resources
Department of English & Fine Arts
Ashley.christ@usafa.edu
(719) 333-9593

Nicole Jerr, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English and Advisor-in-Charge
Department of English & Fine Arts
Nicole.Jerr@usafa.edu
(719) 333-8474