Our department is a community built on curiosity. We welcome students from across the UW – majors and non-majors alike – to deepen their reading and writing skills through a wide array of course offerings that span literary studies, cultural studies, creative writing, and language, rhetoric, and literacy studies. Through our diverse undergraduate and graduate programs, we aim to help students become more incisive thinkers, effective communicators, and imaginative writers by acknowledging that language and its use are powerful and hold the potential to empower or harm individuals and communities; to provide the means to engage in meaningful conversation and collaboration across differences; and to offer methods for understanding, problem solving, and responding to the many pressing collective issues we face in our world.