Study a Bachelor of Arts in English at King's

Transform your mind to transform the world. Studying English prepares you to think critically and communicate with precision and creativity. Reading great works of English literature teach us how to read people and circumstances, placing the stories of the day within the wider context of human experience and adventure. 

Inside this program

Appreciate Great Literature

What makes a text literary? Why do readers return to literature again and again? Study story, figures of speech, and other conventions creatively used by poets, playwrights, and authors. Grow your ability to analyze great works of fiction and discern meaning from them.

Harness The Power Of Language

Business, journalism, public service, teaching—English forms the foundation for careers across public and private sectors. Utilize the power of language to shape and illuminate and learn how it can misshape and obscure if used incorrectly. Develop clear and correct writing skills so you are equipped to communicate effectively.

Express Yourself

Foster your knack for creative writing and share your work with others through student publications. Join Literati, the student society for English majors and minors at King’s, which hosts lunches, end-of-term coffee houses, guest speakers, and creative writing opportunities.

Research Profiles

Piety and Radicalism: Bunyan’s Writings of the 1680’s Arlette Zinck Humanities & Social Sciences

Scholars have long debated the issue of quietism and radicalism in John Bunyan’s prose and poetry. What is one to make of a minister who exhorts Nonconformists to non-violence in his prose writings yet pens imaginative fictions—one titled The Holy War (1682)—that seemingly glorify bloody acts of social and political radicalism? This chapter looks at the extensive corpus of works published by Bunyan in the 1680s, over the course of the last eight years of his life. This chapter does this through the lens of narrative theology, arguing that an appreciation of Bunyan’s pre-critical biblical hermeneutic helps to reconceptualize the apparent contradictions in his perspectives on violence, especially during the era of renewed oppression that occurred in the early 1680s.

Birding, Fiction, and Margaret Atwood's Cultivation of Ecological Awareness Tina Trigg Humanities & Social Sciences

This book chapter discusses an early short story (“The Resplendent Quetzal,” Dancing Girls,1977) and a recent graphic novel series (Angel Catbird, 2016-17) to demonstrate how Atwood’s focus on birding cultivates an ecological awareness that moves beyond literary representations to punctuate her activism and to advocate for a biocentric, sacramental understanding of creation—rather than an anthropocentric one. In terms of conservation, of particular note is Atwood’s emphasis on intergenerational collective action and youth as sources of possibility, change, and hope for the future.

Margaret Atwood Tina Trigg Humanities & Social Sciences

An overview of Atwood's life and works.

Next Steps

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