OU and the English Department

The University of Oklahoma is the state's principal insitution of research and graduate education. There are 22,700 students here in Norman, and an additional 2,600 students at the Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, about twenty miles north of Norman. The College of Arts and Sciences has a strong humanites faculty, with especially distinguished programs in English, History, History of Science, and Philosophy. The History of Science Collection in Bizzell Memorial Library is the best such collection in the world, bringing large numbers of U.S. and international scholars to Norman each year. The University Library, the largest in the state, holds 4.2 million volumes and has very strong digital resources as well. The Western History Collection is one of the finest in the United States and forms a solid basis for our growing offerings and programs in Native American Studies. Last year the university completed a major fund raising campaign, exceeding $500 million.

As this description suggests, our department and university is a vibrant place to work and learn. Recently, Genre, which has been published by the University of Oklahoma since 1976, has come under new editorship and has planned an exciting sequence of special issues. World Literature Today, affiliated with the department, which hosts both the biennial Puterbaugh Conference and the Biennial Neustadt Prize for International Literature, is set to launch a general interest spin-off magazine this autumn. The Variorum Chaucer, associated with our department for several decades, is about to publish A Treatise on the Astrolabe, the 12th fascicle to appear. In addition, three of our programs have received top ranking by Lingua Franca's Real Guide to Grad School. Members of the department are actively publishing in their respective fields, producing scholarly books, textbooks, novels, poetry, and collections of essays with such leading presses as Arizona, Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, MIT, University of Minnesota, W.W. Norton, Southern Illinois, Stanford, and many others. Our faculty has been successful in gaining grants and fellowships from national organizations, including NEH, ACLS, Fulbright-Hayes, New York Academy of Medicine, Bunting Program at Radcliffe, and American Antiquarian Society. Our faculty members are also vital contributors to many national organizations, serving in leadership roles with the MLA, CCCC, Society for Critical Exchange, SCMLA, Rhetoric Society of America, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, and numerous specialty groups. We have one named chair and three endowed ones in the department. We have 29 full-time faculty, 330 English majors, 60 English Language Arts majors, and 65 graduate students (half M.A. and half Ph.D.).