English Department
Students in the English Department at North Central learn to interpret the world through inclusive reading and intentional writing. You will pursue your interests and passions through courses that challenge you to learn both traditional and contemporary approaches to our changing field. Our curriculum fosters skills such as close reading, critical thinking, and effective communication – all of which are valued by today’s employers. Our dedicated professors are ready to guide your research interests, discuss your favorite texts, and serve as mentors in our small classes. Our department supports first-generation and transfer students and has many opportunities for alumni networking and career readiness.
Your experience in the English department is not only about life inside the classroom but also about the community built outside of class, with extra-curriculars including The Kindling, our twenty-five-year-old humor magazine, 30 North, our national arts magazine, and Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honors society. Students develop their writing skills in The Writing Center, their reading skills by discussing texts with published authors in our Writer’s Series, or teaching skills with field experiences in the Naperville area.
“People ask me, ‘why should students today study English?’ To them, I say ‘why not?’ English encourages students to play with language, explore their imagination, and challenge their audience. English majors spend hundreds of pages with Jane Austen & James Baldwin. In doing so, they cultivate empathy, curiosity, and clarity which is why the English department is the core of any strong liberal arts college” – Dr. Jennifer Smith, Chair, Department of English
North Central’s Cardinal Directions curriculum is all about finding your purpose; this is also at the very heart of the English major. Whether it’s Environmental Literature fulfilling your “Sustaining Our World” iCon (interdisciplinary connection) or Black Narrative fitting into your “Challenging Inequity” iCon, you will find your place and write your own story in the English Department at North Central.
Visit the English Department on social media on Instagram and Facebook.
The English Department offers three majors and five minors. Many students combine their love of English with other major or minors on campus. Students interested in law school often pair English with political science. Students interested in psychology often pick up a writing or literature minor. A writing major makes marketing students stand out to employers. Our interdisciplinary film and screen studies minor appeals to students from art and design and media studies. These are just a few examples of how English can help you exceed your personal best!
English Majors
English Education, B.A.
Literature, B.A.
Writing, B.A.
English Minors
Film and Screen Studies
Language Arts and Linguistics
Literature
Professional and Technical Writing
Writing
To learn more about our majors, minors and regular course offerings, please click here.
Faculty and Staff
Faculty Emeriti
Judith Brodhead
Associate Professor of English Emerita
jabrodhead@noctrl.edu
Richard Guzman
Professor of English Emeritus
rrguzman@noctrl.edu
Martha Bohrer
Professor of English Emerita
mlbohrer@noctrl.edu
John Shindler
Professor of English Emeritus
jhshindler@noctrl.edu
Francine G. Navakas
Svend and Elizabeth Bramsen Professor in the Humanities Emerita
fgnavakas@noctrl.edu
Nancy C. Chapman
Associate Professor of English Emerita
ncchapman@noctrl.edu
Priscilla N. Grundy
Professor of English Emerita
pngrundy@noctrl.edu
EXCEED your personal best in the North Central College English department.
Engaged Learning & Career Readiness
- 30 N., a fine arts undergraduate literary review
- The Kindling, a student-led humor magazine
- Community engaged learning & internship opportunities
eXploration through Research
- Senior capstone seminar
- National Council for Undergraduate Research
- North Central College Rall Symposium & Richter Fellowships
Close Faculty Mentorship
- Award-winning authors & scholars with over 100 years of full-time teaching experience at North Central
- Alumni networking & professional development opportunities
Education Abroad
- Semester-long or "May Term" trips around the globe:
- University of York, England & University of Limerick, Ireland
Excellence through Achievement
- Sigma Tau Delta, English Honor Society
- The Writing Center
- Ruth Cooley Poetry Prize
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
- Faculty committed to social justice and inclusion initiatives
- Course offerings include: Black Narrative, Intro. to Latinx Lit., Gender & Lit. Feminisms, Postcolonial Rewriting, & Writing for Social Change
Explore North Central's Writer's Series
North Central College's Writer's Series is proud to bring established and emerging writers to campus for a reading and a classroom visit, providing an opportunity for students to learn about process, craft, and best practices from working writers. Members of the student literary magazine, 30 North, also get to interview the authors. Past writers have been New York Times bestsellers, NEA fellows, prize winners and more, in a variety of genres and markets.
Past writers
Ling Ma
Ling Ma is author of the novel Severance, which received the Kirkus Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018. Her work has appeared in Granta, Playboy, Vice, Ninth Letter, ACM and others. She holds an MFA from Cornell University and an AB from the University of Chicago, where she currently serves as Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts.
Daniel Borzutzky
Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection The Performance of Becoming Human, Daniel Borzutzky is a Chilean- American writer and translator living in Chicago. His other poetry books are In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, The Book of Interfering Bodies, The Ecstasy of Capitulation, and the chapbook Failure in the Imagination. He has published one collection of fiction, Arbitrary Tales. His books of translation include Song for his Disappeared Love by Raul Zurita and Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenun.
Tiana Clark
Tiana Clark is the author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), winner of the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is the winner of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, as well as the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Clark is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.
T. Clutch Fleishmann
T. Clutch Fleischmann is the author of Syzygy, Beauty (Sarabande) and the curator of Body Forms (Essay Press). A Nonfiction Editor at DIAGRAM and Contributing Editor at EssayDaily, their work has appeared in Fourth Genre, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.
Brittany Cavallaro
Brittany Cavallaro is the author of the Charlotte Holmes novels (HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books), including A Study In Charlotte, which was a Junior Library Guild pick, an IndieNext pick, and an American Booksellers Association Best Book of 2016, and The Last of August, which was a New York Times bestseller. The third in the series, The Case for Jamie, is out in March 2018. Cavallaro is also the author of the poetry collection Girl-King (University of Akron Press). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She currently lives in Michigan, where she teaches at the Interlochen Arts Academy.
Lucy Tan
Lucy Tan grew up in New Jersey and has spent much of her adult life in New York and Shanghai. She received her B.A. from New York University and her M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was awarded the 2016 August Derleth Prize and currently serves as the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow. Lucy's work has been published in journals such as Asia Literary Review and Ploughshares, where she was winner of the 2015 Emerging Writer's Contest. This is her first novel.
Janet McNally
Janet McNally is author of the young adult novels Girls in the Moon and The Looking Glass (HarperCollins), and a collection of poems, Some Girls, winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. She has an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and has twice been a fiction fellow with the New York Foundation for the Arts. Janet teaches creative writing at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York.
Rana graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science with minors in Mathematics and English. She served as the president of Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honors society; a senior editor for 30 North, the literary magazine; and a tutor in The Writing Center. Although she was not an English major, she cultivated leadership and communication skills from her time in the English department.
“I think coming from a different country, the way writing courses were structured back home in India were a lot different from the classes I took here at NCC. And although I was well equipped with tools that set me up for success in the classes I took here, I had never studied the subject so intensely before. These classes only improved my writing.”
Overall, Rana believes that one of the best parts about her time with the English department was “definitely the professors and mentors. I’ve received phenomenal support from the professors here. It’s an amazing community to be a part of, it’s definitely a family!”
Rana is starting graduate school at the University of Notre Dame in the Fall of 2024.
“I have met some of my greatest friends and colleagues through the English Department! I have learned so much from them and cherish all of the memories I have made with this great group of people.”
Books have always been a staple of Molly’s life; she finds magic in the words of the novels and stories she’s reading, so it only made sense for her to pursue a degree in English literature. After coming on campus, she found that North Central would be the perfect fit for her.
“I came to North Central because I liked the environment. Stepping onto campus for the first time felt like home--I felt the same kind of magic I found in books.”
Throughout her time on campus, Molly has become more and more involved, joining the College Scholars Honors Program and Untitled, the college’s experimental theater group. In the English department, she has taken on the role of a tutor in The Writing Center, and she has also developed meaningful relationships with her professors from whom she has learned a lot from.
“They have helped me develop skills such as effective close-readings of texts, critical thinking skills, and even, simply, the ability to voice my own analyses in class.”
With her passion for film, Molly also has a minor in Film & Screen Studies. She has found that it complements her Literature degree well and provides her with a new lens to analyze texts and information in her other courses.
“The wide variety of texts that I’m exposed to in the English department allow me to develop new skills and writing techniques to use going forward.”
James has always loved analyzing texts and writing about them, and he excells in these skills. Although he came to North Central primarily to be a member of the cross country and track teams, he enjoys the sense of intellectual community in the English department.
“I found the English department here to be full of wonderful and open-minded professors that each have their own writing expertise that I'd love to adopt and absorb into my own toolbox.”
In a very short time, he has learned about all that the department has to offer students, specifically, the relationships with others.
“I enjoy how small and coherent the English department is with each other, it's just big enough to where you're exposed to different people, but small enough to where you see comforting commonalities among them.”
Running and writing both require commitment and endurance, both of which James has developed in his time at North Central.
“As a child, I always saw myself growing up to become an educator.”
Justin dreamed of becoming a teacher for as long as he can remember, and he has done everything to make that dream become a reality.
As a first-generation student, Justin didn’t know much about the college admissions process, but he was interested in North Central.
“I really fell in love with the school but was worried about the financial aspect of college because my grades in high school were not all that great. I decided to bet on myself and took the financial risk of attending North Central and am ultimately so glad I did, as I have done very well academically.”
Justin has also become a part of the many extra-curricular activities that North Central has to offer. He served as a member of Orientation Staff, a tutor in The Writing Center, and a Resident Assistant in the Residence Hall/ Recreation Center.
Being such an important member of the campus community, Justin believes that his connections with others is one of the best things about his time here. Specifically, Justin says, “All of the English faculty are genuinely kind and want to do all they can to help their students succeed.”
