Welcome to the Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages at Texas Woman's University, one of the founding departments when the university began in 1903. The history of the department is long and rich. With a Ph.D. program in Rhetoric, our department is a center for the study of literature, language, and writing. We offer a series of courses on writing, literature, and foreign languages. Our activities in classes, in the Write Site, and in our organizations, such as ERGO, reflect our commitment to preparing and empowering students for participation in our society's discourses. In addition, we offer the following programs of study:

MARY BEARD ON THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS — Many of the questions raised by Rattigan underlie what I have to say. I’m not here to convince you that classical literature, culture, or art is worth taking seriously; I suspect that would be preaching to the converted. I’m here instead to suggest that the cultural language of the classics continues to be an essential and ineradicable dialect of “Western culture” (embedded in the drama of Rattigan, as much as in the poetry of Ted Hughes or the novels of Margaret Atwood or Donna Tartt—The Secret History couldn’t, after all, have been written about a department of geography). But I also want to examine a bit more closely our fixation on the decline of classical learning. And here too Rattigan’s Browning Version, or its sequels, offer an intriguing perspective. The play has always been popular with impoverished theater and TV companies, partly for the simple reason that Rattigan set the whole thing in Crocker-Harris’s sitting room, which makes it extremely cheap to stage. But there have also been two movie versions of The Browning Version, which did venture outside Crocker-Harris’s apartment to exploit the cinematic potential of the English private school, from its quaint wood-paneled classrooms to its rolling green cricket pitches. More...