The English Department's main goals are to teach skills in critical thinking and textual analysis, to provide familiarity with literary works central to Western cultural traditions, and to develop students' knowledge of and appreciation for major traditions of world literature.

English programs at Coe offer opportunities to grow in knowledge of literature and to learn thinking, reading and writing skills that can serve you well in your professional and personal life.

By studying literature, we gain a vision of humanity that crosses boundaries of time and place.

By writing about our reading, we trace and refine our responses to valued works of literature, and we enter into conversation with those works and with each other. We join the tradition of human beings trying to understand themselves and explain themselves to each other by means of verbal pictures of human thought and action.

By talking with each other about our reading and writing, we form ties with each other, entering into the process of creating communities here and now that are in contact with the great communities found in the past and beyond the borders of our everyday lives.

And by composing works of literature, whether as experiments in literature courses or for performance or publication in creative writing courses, we participate at another level in humanity's ongoing efforts at self-understanding and life-affirming interaction.

Course offerings include the classics of American and English Literature, as well as popular literature and film, and World Literatures in translation, especially Irish, Middle-Eastern, Asian, African and Russian.   The Department stresses strong analytical skills and employs close textual analysis in academic writing.

In Creative Writing courses, the faculty provides students with inspiration and guidance at all stages of generating and editing a literary work.  Typical courses include novel writing, playwriting, and workshops in poetry and fiction.

All Coe English professors are published writers: poets, novelists, playwrights, critics, reviewers, and essayists. Teachers work closely with students to develop individual programs of study, designed to enhance each student’s skills.

English and Creative Writing graduates from Coe have gone on to many and various professional careers including: editors, professional writers, reporters, public relations officers, attorneys, ministers, fund-raisers, magazine editors, publishers, technical writers for industry, web designers, teachers, foreign service officers, business owners, FBI officers, administrators, librarians, physicians and public officials.