English

Why study English at New College?

Students in English are part of a dynamic field—readily incorporating new genres and approaches from other disciplines. English at New College includes the “great books,” but also works that are popular or experimental—even some you might not immediately recognize as “literature” at all.

English area of concentration

“English” is a flexible and capacious field, founded on careful engagement with artistic writing or “literature,” but reaching into all corners of communicating in English including film, digital media and performance. Our field engages questions that intersect with philosophy, cultural anthropology and the arts. A degree in English can lead in many directions after college — from writing-intensive careers such as publishing and education, to less obvious tracks in library or curatorial work, healthcare, human resources, marketing and business, and public service with nonprofit organizations.

What You’ll Learn:

At New College we offer regular courses in literature and culture from the early modern period to contemporary print and electronic media, and performance.

The Area of Concentration in English focuses on intersections between English language literature and its historical and cultural environments.

Students graduating in this field should be able to analyze texts from a variety of genres and historical periods; to recognize the role of literature in encounters between cultures across national, ethnic, and temporal lines; and to be able to deploy a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to the study of literature and communication in English.

Alumni

General Counsel/Chief Compliance Officer
Prima Capital Advisors

Digital Media Coordinator
Museum of Discovery and Science, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Academic Advisor
St. Thomas University

Studio Assistant
Tanglewood Works

Development Manager
Brooke USA

What Can I Do with an English AOC?

Faculty

Robert Knox, Jr. Professor Emeritus of English
Nova Myhill Professor of English and Theater and Performance Studies
Patricia Okker President/Professor of English
Miriam Wallace Professor of English and Gender Studies, Division Chair
Jessica Young Assistant Professor of English
Robert Zamsky Professor of English

Recent Theses

Annihilation, Negation, and Revelation: Deconstructive Trauma and the Mysterious/Unknown in the Works of Emily Dickinson and Flannery O’Connor
Fearing the Future: The Uncanny Child and Modern Children’s Literature by L. Frank Baum, Neil Gaiman, and J. K. Rowling
Form or Fascism?: Exploring Genre and Innovation in Three Nontraditional Sonnet Sequences.
Illustration as Interpretation: Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost
Jazz Poetry: The American Idiom
Killing Pearl: […] Confronting Motherhood and the Redemptive Fantasy of The Scarlet Letter in Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Red Letter Plays
“A Maneuvering Business”: Courtship, Family, and Marriage in Novels of Manners (Burney, Austen, Edgeworth)
A New Multimedia Edition of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera
The Quest to Find Utopia: From Thomas More to Aldous Huxley
Reclaiming Representations: The Revisionist Work of Ishmael Reed
“[T]o isolate her out of the loud world:” Towards a Maternal Continuum in the Writings of William Faulkner
Why a Duck? Self, Locality, Community, and Relevance in the Work of Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe.

More Information

English Curriculum

View the requirements for an AOC in English, get details for an application and see sample pathways to graduation.

Undergraduate Program

New College of Florida offers more than 40 different majors in humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as a number of interdisciplinary concentrations.