No. 2 Public Program in State, Top 100 in Nation
The English graduate programs rose in the 2025 U.S. News & World Report rankings to crack the top 100, rising 18 spots to 90. OHIO's English graduate programs also were named second best in the state of Ohio out of public institutions.
Our Imprint on Creative Writing, Scholarship and Teaching
English has had a long and venerable history at Ohio University since its inception in 1829. We now draw on our traditional strengths to offer flexible and dynamic concentrations in creative writing, literature and culture, and pre-law to our English majors.
Our doctoral program is among the nation's top programs and boasts a host of well-known faculty and alumni creative writers along with literature scholars and specialists in rhetoric and composition, including AI-assisted writing.
And our online master's program helps ensure that the state of Ohio has some of the nation’s best-educated high school teachers.
In addition to our own majors, the department serves at least 75 percent of the undergraduate student body in the university’s BRICKS "general education" writing courses and humanities areas. We welcome all OHIO students to engage with us in an ongoing conversation about how and why we read and write, what it means to think creatively, critically and analytically about text
The History of English at OHIO
The English Department was not formally created until 1829, but rhetoric, literature, composition, and how to teach them have been central to Ohio University’s learning experiences from the very beginning.
OHIO’s literary societies, which were active by the second decade of the 19th century, spent a great deal of time on essays for competitions and discussion, and, according to university historian Betty Hollow, by about 1822 English composition and rhetoric were required during all four years of a student’s career ( Ohio University 1804-2004: The Spirit of a Singular Place. 18, 22). Among other duties more typical of the presidency, the Board assigned the university’s first president, Jacob Lindley the job of “instruct[ing] all classes in English composition, with themes due every two weeks” (18).
OHIO’s fourth president, William Holmes McGuffey, created the McGuffey Readers that served as reading textbooks for elementary school children across America from 1836 well into the 20th century. Teaching English skills clearly held an important place for Ohio University from the beginning.
As Ohio University shifted from a focus on classical education to the more modern curriculum, the study of literature across histories and nationalities became central to a strong liberal arts education. The English Department has helped set the pace for changes in the field with a nationally and internationally known faculty of literary historians, theorists, and critics.
Ohio University responded to the turbulent social scene of the late 1960s by investing in new programs to form strong student communities, liberalize the curriculum, and bring student voices to life. This included the English Department forming what was to become our nationally ranked creative writing program (Hollow, Betty. Ohio University 1804-2004: A Singular Place . Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003.). Today English has an esteemed and award-winning creative writing faculty who also shepherd both student and professional literary journals.
The three interrelated sub-areas of English studies at Ohio—Rhetoric & Composition, Literature, and Creative Writing—form a “braid” of specialization and course offerings that strengthen students’ transferable skills and support the variety of student interests. Together they provide rich humanist experiences not only for English students, but also for the more than 75 percent of the university undergraduate student population that takes English courses.
Now, with the rapid changes to reading and writing that the 21st century will continue to bring, the department is building on its strengths, engaging students in reading, writing, and critical thinking to apply those skills to new media, digital humanities, and human-centered uses of AI.
English Department Mission Statement
The English Department at Ohio University is a community of scholars and artists dedicated to the idea that words matter. Our students and faculty participate in an ongoing conversation about how and why we read and write, what it means to think creatively, critically, and analytically about texts, and what it means to examine the world through a multitude of diverse perspectives.
The department’s faculty and staff care deeply about student learning at both the graduate and undergraduate levels and are committed to teaching English studies from foundational skills in writing and rhetoric for General Education through helping doctoral students develop into productive scholars and effective teachers.
As a highly research-active department with a strong degree of articulation between the graduate and undergraduate programs, we are able to offer our undergraduate majors an education combining the advantages of a large research institution with the close personal attention they would get at smaller colleges. With class sizes that encourage responses from peers and from teachers, our students engage with composing and writing in multiple forms, for multiple purposes, and for multiple audiences.
Through learning to read closely, students of English gain aesthetic, historical, and analytical understandings of texts in a variety of contexts. We are proud that our students are immersed in the critical writing, reading, and thinking that prepare them for a 21 st century work force that demands flexibility, extraordinary communication skills, empathy, ethical values, and ongoing intellectual curiosity.