The Department offers the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. Undergraduates may specialize in Literary Studies, Professional Writing, or Creative Writing. At the graduate level, the department offers an M.A. in English (open specialization) and a Ph.D. in Literature, Theory, Cultural Studies and in Rhetoric and Composition. Faculty are also involved in such interdisciplinary programs as the highly regarded Purdue OWL; African American Studies; American Studies; Comparative Literature; Linguistics; and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The department's population includes thirty-four tenured or tenure-track faculty, ten lecturers, four clinical teaching professors, and twenty limited-term lecturers. Purdue University's Department of English is committed to maintaining a welcoming and inclusive environment in all areas of faculty effort, including scholarship, instruction, and engagement.

The department is home to a number of exciting and dynamic ventures in different disciplinary areas, including the CROW (Corpus & Repository of Writing) Lab; the COVE Collective; the Games, Narrative, and Esports Certificate; several grant-funded digital humanities projects; and community engagement projects, such as the Big Read and the Literary Awards Contest. The department is also home to two major scholarly journals: Modern Fiction Studies and Arthuriana, as well as the undergraduate arts journal The Bell Tower.

This is an exciting time to join the leadership team in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. As a vital component of a leading public research university, the college features a wide variety of excellent academic programs across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. We are committed to interdisciplinarity, innovation, and national leadership in higher education, most notably through our nationally recognized Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program, which reaches more than 10,000 students per year across campus.

Purdue offers substantial support for research and teaching at both the university and college levels. The college's Office of Research advances scholarship across its fields through a portfolio of targeted programs designed to promote collaboration and research excellence. The college's commitment to interdisciplinarity and innovation is apparent through its many faculty-led centers, labs, and initiatives. The college and its faculty are deeply committed to teaching excellence and to the central role that liberal arts play in grounding a university curriculum. The deep integration of graduate and undergraduate students into research and experiential learning is among its major strengths. The college values intellectual rigor, open debate, and the exploration of diverse perspectives in the pursuit of knowledge.