As a learner-centered and discovery-driven institution, Western Michigan University values the research of its faculty. The following lists the research interests of faculty members in the Department of English.
Faculty research interests
- Milton
- Seventeenth-Century British Literature
- Cognitive Theory
- Poetry
- English education
- Thought and writing
- Methods in teaching college writing
- American literature
- American fiction
- Faulkner
- Melville
- Theatre and popular music
- Jewish theatre
- Rhetoric of sciences and science communication
- Visual rhetoric
- Science writing pedagogy
- Public, professional, letter and grant writing
- Critical theory
- Baudrillardian rhetoric
- Creative writing (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction
- Intersections between gift exchange and capitalism, theories of benevolence, and systems of obligation in the literature and culture of eighteenth-century England
- Modern British literature
- Literary interpretation
- Contemporary literature
- Ethics and religion in the 19th and 20th century
- Adaptation studies and children's visual culture
- Portrayals of gender in children's and young adult fantasy
- Cultural and historical activity theory
- Language variation and change
- English in the United States
- Language attitudes and standardization
- African historical tradition and folktales
- African historiography
- Turkish folklore and literature
- British and Irish literature and culture from 1660-1830
- Romanticism, sensibility and the gothic
- Queer studies and the history of sexuality
- Advanced fiction
- Fiction workshop
- Flash fiction
- Artifacts in fiction
- Culturally relevant pedagogies
- Writing program administration
- First year writing
- English renaissance drama and literature
- Shakespeare
- Linguistics
- African American literature
- American literature
- Colonial America to 1763
- Medieval literature
- Vikings history and culture
- Law and literature in Anglo-Saxon England
- Old Norse
- Gender and print culture in the early American republic
- Renaissance history and culture
- Teaching secondary English
- Teaching and technology
- Postcolonial studies, including middle eastern literature
- Film history and criticism
- Literature and the American west
- American literary realism and naturalism