BY Katrina Scalise (COM’25)
The English Department has overhauled its undergraduate degree requirements for the first time in more than a decade, making the curriculum more diverse, engaging, accessible, and flexible, and introducing a cutting-edge, team-taught introductory course to bring all new majors together.
Beginning this fall, all new English majors are required to take “Encounters: Reading Across Time and Space,” or EN 101, which introduces students to canonical and noncanonical works from the middle ages to the present, within a global lens. The course encourages students to compare older works — by authors like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Gertrude Stein — to modern literary responses or “encounters” by contemporary authors like Kazuo Ishiguro, Patience Agbabi and Louise Erdrich. Previously, there was no required 100-level course for all new majors.
“The new major is designed to introduce a diverse range of voices into the curriculum right at the beginning. This better matches the rest of our course offerings as a department, which have diversified in recent years,” said Associate Professor Joseph Rezek, who is co-teaching the course. “The course itself is fairly experimental — we hope it will be a new way to engage canonical works of literature, from Beowulf to the present.”
The class is currently team-taught by Rezek, who is also Director of the American & New England Studies Program, and Associate Professor Amy Appleford, Chair of the English Department. Going forward, faculty teaching the course will continue to have different areas of expertise to fit the scope of the curriculum, with one focusing on early English literature and one in American or British literature of a later period, according to the department.
Maurice Lee, professor and director of undergraduate studies and outreach, said the goal of EN 101 is to better emphasize the history of English and its relationship to contemporary work. “The old major was very heavily focused on literary history told chronologically from the beginnings of English literature studies,” he said. “Now, instead of starting at Homer and working our way up to the present day, we designed this new course as a way to show how old lit and new lit are in conversation with each other.”
The “encounters” aspect of the course title also reflects students’ own reactions and responses to the English literature they’re learning about. As a result, one assignment in EN 101 tasks students with creating an “encounter” of their own with a text on the syllabus.
“This creative assignment can take the form of a literary work like a poem or a short story, or a performance, work or art, graphic novel, video, video game — any form they want. We are very excited to see what they come up with this semester,” Appleford said.
The new English major will also no longer require British Literature I (EN 322) or British Literature II (EN 323), although students are still able to take those courses if they wish. Other updates include changing the number of courses required. According to the English Department, newly-enrolled English majors now have ten required courses, rather than eleven. Also, the “Diverse Literatures in English” requirement’s name was changed to “Power, Identity, and Difference.”
“The older multicultural model represented a lot of different backgrounds,” Lee said regarding the requirement name change, “We wanted to emphasize the importance of attending to power structures when talking about diversity.”
Current English majors welcome the changes to the curriculum.
“They’re moving away from the British canon and diversifying the literature,” said Roni Lakin (CAS ’25), who enrolled in the major before the new course. “It’s also good that they’re now getting all the English majors together in an introductory course during the first semester. It’s nice to meet people within your major right away. Beforehand, we were scattered out into different 100-level courses,” Lakin added.
“I definitely think the English major at BU was heavily Eurocentric and I appreciate that they changed it to be a study of literature through multiple lenses with more focus on diversity,” Kritika Iyer (CAS ’24) said. She agrees that the major was in need of an update.
Lee said that one of the goals of the English major overhaul was to make the major more accessible. The department also hopes that the introductory course will attract first-year students to English by illustrating the modern relevance of older literature, and “showing that the canon is still very much alive today,” as Rezek said.
“Early on, we want to offer the range of materials you can study as an English major,” said Lee, “Hopefully people will come to the class and think, ‘there’s something here for me.’”
EN 101: Encounters: Reading Across Time and Space fulfills a single unit for these BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation, Teamwork/Collaboration. EN 101 will be offered every semester.