We offer a rich variety of both traditional and cutting edge courses designed to ignite your imagination and sharpen your intellect. The department places a strong emphasis on developing the critical and creative writing of our students. Your Mount Royal University degree prepares you for future graduate studies or for a career in which clear, competent writing and communication are valued.
We read the text not just to find out what it says, but to see how it works. We practice the art of writing — not just to communicate information, but to do so with conviction, clarity, reasoned argument and personality. We work with the idea in mind that texts in their many forms — poetry, film, fiction, drama, the essay and technical communication — shape our critical and ethical sensibilities, our awareness of culture and tradition, and our identities as people in communities larger than ourselves.
Smaller class sizes allow for personalized learning and enhanced student participation in the classroom. Our dedicated and award-winning faculty will not only know your name, but they will also welcome you with a range of conceptual approaches to literature. Whether you find yourself in a "Comics as Literature" course or a course on "Victorian Literary Aesthetics," you can be sure that texts are treated as a living force capable of both impacting and being impacted by the larger concerns of the society around us.
Department of English, Languages, and Cultures Programs
Environmental Humanities Minor
Spanish Language and Hispanic Studies Minor
Draw on the linguistic and cultural expertise of faculty members who are mostly native speakers. Mount Royal's English, Languages, and Cultures Department offers credit courses at a variety of levels in:
Discover all majors and minors offered by the Faculty of Arts.
Writer-in-Residence Program
The Writer-in-Residence Program brings authors of national and international standing to Mount Royal to work with and mentor students. Since 2007, the program has provided an opportunity for authors, students and faculty to meet, exchange ideas and increase awareness of scholarly and artistic endeavours. The goal of the Visiting Author Program is to allow students, faculty and the greater community access to distinguished and unique voices in the Canadian literary landscape in a personal and professional way that encourages new ideas.Department of English, Languages, and Cultures Statement on Racialized Violence
The Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, located on Treaty 7, homelands of the Niitsitapi (the Siksika, Piikani, Kainai), the Îyârhe Nakoda, and Tsuut'ina Nations unequivocally condemns the murders of African Americans Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. As faculty members engaged in teaching, scholarship, and learning regarding literary and film narratives that reflect the historical and current realities of anti-blackness, anti-Indigenous racism, and oppression, we are outraged by these killings, two of which (Taylor and Floyd) were committed by the police, while the other occurred when a young man (Arbery) was shot by white men as he was jogging. Enough is enough. We stand with communities of colour and Indigenous peoples throughout America who are appalled and are making their voices heard through their legitimate constitutional right to protest. They have suffered the violent effects of colonization and white supremacy since 1492. They have endured enslavement, segregation, lynching, brutality, rape, epistemicide, and land dispossession. Their stories of anguish, survivance, and resilience have been and are told across the centuries, right up to this moment, in oral and written traditions that we study and teach. Today, we renew our commitment to the study, to the research, and to the teaching of these stories.
Yet, we must point out that not only the United States but also Canada continues to bear responsibility for our destructive colonial past, a past that makes itself felt in the everyday lives of First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Black Canadians, Afro Indigenous, and recent immigrants from communities of colour. The death of Regis Korchinski-Pacquet, who was Black and Indigenous, coming as a result of police interactions in her own residence, constitutes the most recent tragic example in Canada’s long history of violence and dispossession. Such violence and dispossession are unacceptable. If the United States’ history of oppression includes (but is far from limited to) Matoaka, Metacomet, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Emmett Till, Martin Luther King Jr., Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner, Canada’s is no less grave. Black, Indigenous, and racialized people living today in Canada experience undeniably greater levels of oppression, disease, incarceration, violence, and police brutality than white Canadians. They too are people with names, such as Louis Riel, Leo Lachance, Machuar Madut, Abdirahman Abdi, Tina Fontaine, Colten Boushie, and the thousands of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls whose stories are documented by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Final Report 2019). Canada too is in crisis.
Like our colleagues in Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Royal University, we value taking positive steps to foster decolonial, anti-racist action. We support students as they engage in the crucial work of opposing all forms of oppression and of constructing a more inclusive and just world. We recognize the need to increase our commitment to do the same both in and out of the classroom. We see this time as a turning point, one in which silence is complicity. We commit to students of colour and Indigenous students both in and out of our classrooms to search for justice and peace. We will use our textual, analytical, critical, and linguistic skills to inform, teach, write, and speak out. We pledge to survey and listen to students regarding anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous racism. We will also compile an ongoing substantive list of primary resources from our specific disciplines, as well as resources for students and faculty to access support and help in their own lives at this critical time.
Resources
Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.
Allen, Lillian. Women Do This Every Day. Women’s Press, 1993.
Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Dial Books, 1963.
Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return. Random House, 2001.
Chariandy, David. I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter, Brother, and Soucouyant. Penguin, 2018.
Clarke, Austin. More: A Novel. Thomas Allen Publishers, 2008.
Cole, Desmond. “Remembering Black, Indigenous, and Other People of Colour Killed by Canadian Police.” Pyrisence. May 29, 2020.
Cole, Desmond. The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power. Doubleday, 2020.
Comack, Elizabeth. Racialized Policing: Aboriginal People’s Encounters With the Police. Fernwood, 2012.
Compton, Wayde. The Outer Harbour: Stories. Arsenal, 2014.
Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal. HarperCollins, 2006.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas). University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Dei, George J. Sefa. Anti-Racist Education: Theory and Practice. Fernwood Publishing, 1996.
Diangelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press, 2018.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Random House, 1952.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 1952.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963.
Gibson, Chantal. How She Read. Caitlin, 2020.
Goldberg, Jesse A. “James Baldwin and the Anti-Black Force of Law: On Excessive Violence and Exceeding Violence.” Public Culture 1 September 2019; 31 (3): 521–538. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7532763
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” April 1963.
Lubrin, Canisia. The Dyzgraphxst. McClelland & Stewart, 2020.
Maynard, Robyn. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Fernwood, 2018.
McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.
nourbeSe philip, m. Blank: Essays and Interviews. BookHug, 2017.
Office of Academic Indigenization’s Resources. Mount Royal University.
Paradakar, Shree. June 3, 2020. "‘What white privilege?’ ‘Why can’t you be more civil?’ Some FAQs about racism and answers you may find challenging." The Star.
Reid-Benta, Zalik. Frying Plantain. Anansi, 2020.
Stewart, Anthony. You Must Be a Basketball Player: Rethinking Integration the University and Visitor: My Life in Canada. Fernwood, 2009.
Tator, Carol, and Frances Henry. Racial Profiling in Canada: Challenging the Myth of 'A Few Apples.' University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Tyson, Timothy. The Blood of Emmett Till. Simon & Schuster, 2017.
University of Alberta. 2020. “Black Lives Matter Resource Recommendations.”
University of Minnesota Press. 2020. “Reading for Racial Justice.”
Vandiver, Margaret. Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South. Rutger University Press, 2005.
Vernon, Karina. The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020.
Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada. Insomniac Press, 1997.
Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Places. Project Gutenberg, 2006 (1892).