English Honors Program

The English Honors Program is open to applicants who have shown exceptional ability in English. English Honors is designed to expand and intensify the academic experiences of advanced English majors through completion of a three-quarter, cohort-based program. The program builds a community of undergraduate scholars within the English Department, providing them with opportunities to work closely with UW professors in independent study and research, and with special events such as lectures and receptions.

Contents:

2026 - 2027 Honors Program

Faculty: 

Alys Weinbaum 
Leila Kate Norako 
Jesse Oak Taylor 
Laura Chrisman 

Seminars:

Fall 2026

“Memory and Forgetting: Literature as Archive,” Prof. Alys Weinbaum 

This seminar will examine literature’s involvement in the creation and contestation of narratives about the past, and thus in the writing and/or erasure of individual and/or collective memory and history. This is, of course, a pressing concern in the present conjuncture—one in which the idea of historical “truth” is under siege, and in which what gets taught in classrooms throughout the United States is hotly debated, and, in some instances, legally restricted. While all literary texts (fiction and non-fiction alike) implicitly create narratives about the past as part of their world building, our focus in this seminar will be on texts that deliberately dwell on issues of historical narration, remembrance, and forgetting in a manner that is self-reflective . More specifically, we will focus on novels, graphic novels, and memoires that thematize questions of how we remember the past; what we remember about the past; what stories we understand to be part of our collective memory; how we memorialize or archive the past; how we forget the past; how “the powers that be” disavow the past; and, not least, how and why questions about what is remembered, memorialized, forgotten and disavowed matter in the present moment of reading. 

In addition to treating a selection of 4-5 primary texts drawn from the list below (nb: still provisional), we will read several key theoretical texts on concepts such as archive, individual memory, collective memory, forgetting, and historical disavowal or erasure. The writing goal is production of a 10 to 12 page research paper (on a text of your choice), that directly engages the seminar’s questions and concerns. Papers will be developed in stages including abstracts, annotated bibliographies, and drafts. Sessions on building research skills and feedback on drafts will be integrated into the quarter.

Primary texts: Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night; Eva Hoffmann, After Such Knowledge; Tessa Hulls, Feeding Ghosts; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; Lois Lowry, The Giver; Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline; Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police; Rivers Solomon, The Deep

Theoretical intertexts by Aleida Assmann, Walter Benjamin, Dionne Brand, M. Gessen, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, and Michael Rothberg.

Fulfills Power and Difference and Genre, Method, and Language distribution credits

"Dickens, Darwin, and Marx," Prof. Jesse Oak Taylor
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), and Karl Marx’s Capital (Vol. 1, 1867) were written within ten years and twenty miles of one another. Each is a big, system-mapping book that seeks to understand some of the largest and most complex forces that shape our world: capitalism, empire, the world-city, and Earth itself. Each has also shaped our world in profound ways. All three authors have become adjectives, their names appended to ideas and political movements that have long outlived anything Charles, Charles, or Karl might have recognized. In this course, we will read these monumental works in conjunction with one another, exploring the connections (and tensions) between them, while contextualizing them in relation to the world in which they appeared: most notably London, the first global metropolis, capital of an Earth-spanning empire, and a thoroughly manufactured landscape in which even the weather bore the effects of human action. We will also think about what it means to read them in our own time, connecting their insights to the manifold emergencies that define our own time: climate change, rampant inequality, the Covid-19 pandemic, ecosystem collapse. In so doing, we will seek to treat them both as historical antecedents and as contemporaries, using their enduring influence to think about the origins and afterlives of ideas and the forms that enable them to travel.

Assignments will include short reading responses and annotations, a final project proposal, and a research project of the student’s own design, which can be either a traditional academic essay or deploy an alternative format or medium.

Fulfills Historical Depth distribution credit

Winter 2027

"Bearing Poetic Witness: Disaster, Racial Violence, and Extractive Industry,” Prof. Laura Chrisman 

This course explores the violent, racialized impact of industrialism, as refracted through two major works of imaginative literature: Muriel Rukeyser's 1938 The Book of the Dead , and South African poet Uhuru Portia Phalafala's 2023 Mine, Mine, Mine. Rukeyser deals with one of the USA’s worst industrial disasters, in rural West Virginia, in which thousands of migratory workers, drilling a tunnel, sickened and died from silicosis. Phalafala charts the same incurable disease as it deprived thousands of migratory Black South Africans of their lives or health over decades of work in the South African mining industry. These works share a desire to expose the corporeal, economic and emotional harm done to workers, their families, and communities, and they share anti-capitalist, feminist vantage points. Both create radically experimental styles for bearing witness to these disasters. But one (Rukeyser) writes as a white outsider, one (Phalafala) as the descendant of a Black miner, whose work is a personal exploration of ancestry, memory, and the legacy of apartheid. While Rukeyser is visually, and cinematically, oriented (she intended to make a film from this material), Phalafala is oriented towards music, organizing her book as a sequence of musical movements. While Rukeyser draws from written documentary sources (transcripts from trials, etc), Phalafala incorporates oral traditions of knowledge dissemination. The two works are, then, strikingly complementary and contrastive. In very different ways, the works ask questions about the social function of art, the representational challenges of depicting non-spectacular, slow violence, the relationships between documents, orality, spirituality, and memory. The course will use a range of supporting archival, scholarly, and theoretical materials to illuminate the primary texts.

This course is designed to advance student work on their thesis by emphasizing research skills and preparation. We spend the first six weeks on these two literary works. Students write short methodological assignments that highlight different types of research: historical/contextual research, theoretically-driven research, scholarship-driven research. The rest of the course is spent on further developing research skills, methods, and thesis proposals. For the course’s final paper, students have the choice of writing about the topics/texts explored in the first six weeks, or writing about a topic that they wish to pursue for their spring quarter thesis.

Fulfills Historical Depth and Power and Difference distribution credits

"Queer Future Pasts," Prof. Leila Kate Norako 

This seminar invites students to explore the ways that contempoaray queer creatives engage the medieval archive (and audience expectations of what is/isn’t authentically “medieval”) in their work. In doing so, these creatives regularly insist on two essential truths: that queer folk have always existed and will always exist, and that queer joy deserves as much representation as the remembrance of queer struggles.

Drawing on a variety of queer theorists and cultural critics (Leslie Feinberg, bell hooks, Cesar Muñoz, and Maggie Nelson, to name but a few), we will spend the first few weeks of the course in the medieval archive, paying particular attention to the stories of Joan of Arc, Eleanor Rykener, Edward II, and Marinos the Monk. We will also acquaint ourselves with how fictional and theological literature in medieval England makes space for the representation of gender expansiveness and same-sex affection, and how the gaps and omissions of queerness in the medieval archive require an ethics of care and imagination akin to the “critical fabulation” that Saidiya V. Hartman proposes in her own work.

The rest of the class will entail a deep dive into contemporary media such as: the public-facing “queer medieval fever dream” created by Tyler Gunther (aka The Greedy Peasant), the fiction of Nicola Griffith and Shelly Parker-Chan, Derek Jarman’s Edward II, Chappel Roan’s performances, the artwork of Fyodor Pavlov, the film Nimona, and the upcoming animated film Moonlit.

Students will have the opportunity to participate in a queer medieval salon, held during the Winter quarter.

Assignments: a long-form journal with weekly entries, and a proposal for the honors thesis.

Fulfills Historical Depth and Power and Difference distribution credits

Admission

Application to the English Honors Cohort is competitive. Applications are accepted annually after winter quarter grades have been posted. Submit your honors application by 4pm Monday, April 6, 2026. Applications will be available starting in February 2026. (Note: to get access to the application, you need to be logged into your UW account.)

Space is limited. Meeting minimum eligibility requirements, or being a member of the College Honors Program , does not guarantee admission. Selection takes place through the competitive admission process. 

Students usually complete the English Honors program when they have Junior or Senior standing, with an average of 115-135 credits earned. A cohort of approximately 40 students will be admitted during spring quarter, and must complete the program in residence over autumn, winter, and spring quarters of the following academic year.

To be eligible for English Honors, all students must be declared English majors who apply in spring quarter for the following Autumn's English Honors cohort, and must have:

  • completed at least two quarters at the UW
  • completed at least 15 credits of UW English courses at the 200-level or above
  • completed ENGL 302, or be planning to complete it in Spring or Summer quarter, before beginning the Honors program in the Autumn. For Creative Writing track majors, students can complete ENGL 302 during the Autumn quarter of the honors program.
  • a minimum UW cumulative GPA of 3.3
  • a minimum UW English GPA of 3.7 (in courses at the 200-level and above) Students who fail to meet this GPA requirement but who feel that there are mitigating circumstances, such as having taken a group of exceptionally difficult courses or having undergone a period of personal difficulty resulting in a lowered GPA, may petition the department's Director of Undergraduate Programs for special consideration.
  • at least three remaining quarters in residence at the UW: students in the Honors Program must take English honors courses on campus in Autumn, Winter, and Spring.
  • submitted an application, including a UW transcript (unofficial is fine) and your answers to two questions:
    1. what do you hope to gain by participating in the English Honors Program? (about 250 words)
    2. please describe a good learning experience you have had while pursuing the English major and discuss how it informed your decision to apply to Honors (about 250 words) 

View/print the honors application 

2025-2026 Honors Program

Faculty: 
Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges 
Gillian Harkins 
Charles LaPorte 
Michelle Liu 

Seminars:

Fall 2025

Secularity and Faith in Modern Literature, Charles LaPorte

This course introduces students to the “religious turn” of much twenty-first century literary scholarship, as well as to the complex relationship between literature and secularization in anglophone culture since the Enlightenment. Religious expressions are found throughout the cultural record of modernity, and yet until recently it was common for literary scholars to speak and write as though religion would soon disappear from the world. Whole artistic movements once understood to represent a break from religion - realism, Symbolism, decadence, the Black Arts movement – can in a different light seem like expressions of religion. Works that once stood out for their iconoclasm - Jane Eyre , The Souls of Black Folk, The Waste Land - now stand out for their commitments to different kinds of religiosity. As Valentine Cunningham remarks, literature in English tends to be heretical, for certain, but this amounts to a reason for literary scholars to study religion, rather than the reverse. It is a vast critical issue in our day.

This course will cover literature ranging from the eighteenth century (probably beginning with the poetry of William Wordsworth) to the present day (probably ending with the poetry of M. NourbeSe Philip). We will treat different genres: fiction, non-fiction, verse,; . It will fulfill the Historical Period requirement (much of the material will be pre-1945).

Critical Fabulations and Fabulist Histories: re-imagining beginnings, re-embodying presents, and re-shaping endings, Michelle Liu

First the beginning, then the middle, and finally, the end: this means of pattern making may seem as natural as reading a book from start to finish, as tracing a life from birth to death. And yet, this seminar will explore what else we can see when we treat this “natural” preference for linear chronology as a cultural construct that can cloud and narrow both our abilities to describe the roots of problems and our capacities to imagine strategies of restoration and resilience. We will engage with historian-novelists, storyteller historians, anarchist archaeologists, poet-biologists, and modular essayists who put pressure on the idea of how and why we begin so that we can imagine alternative pasts that help us more fully engage our present and shape our futures. These texts all examine how framing and re-framing our pasts necessarily means taking a hard look at the archives that inform these versions of the past, and querying what has counted as evidence. Leaning into Saidiya Hartman’s ideas about critical fabulations and Minsoo Kang’s ideas about fabulist histories, we’ll visit the UW Special Collections to engage with the archives ourselves, and ask: What gets saved, and what discarded, and why? What do we understand as belonging to the genre of evidence? How do we use evidence? And how do we strive to be in ethical relationship with the thinking and feeling of those who become the sources for our arguments? A sampling of writers and artists we may discuss together: Saidiya Hartman, Minsoo Kang, Tao Leigh Goffe, David Graeber and David Wengrow, Anis Bawarshi, Cathy Park Hong, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Fulfills Genre, Method, and Language or Power and Difference distribution area.

Winter 2026

Pages/Screens/Controllers: Stories Within and Across Media, Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges

For well over a century, filmmakers have adapted print texts into stories featuring images and music. Before cinema, playwrights rendered popular novels into embodied, spoken dramatic stories, even when the novel had not yet completed its initial serial publication run. In an era of new technologies and entertainment conglomerates, interconnected stories emerge across media, creating an overarching storyworld that exceeds the boundaries of a single text or mode of representation. Extended reality (XR) and games immerse us into tales that require physical interaction.

English 494 examines the relationship between stories and the media in which we create and experience them. How does the medium shape the story? What happens when stories move across media or simultaneously appear in multiple media? What possibilities do new media technologies present for storytelling and inhabiting storyworlds? What limits do media—and the industries supporting creation and distribution—place on the stories that can be told? To explore these questions, we will focus on three types of story-media relationships: adaptation, transmedia, and immersion. We will use adaptation, narrative, transmedia, and new media theory to analyze creative texts composed in various forms: print alphabetic and visual books, film (including 360-degree and VR cinema), games, podcasts, and webtexts, among others. Moreover, we will investigate the contexts surrounding not only the development of particular media but also the stories told within them.

To develop an understanding of various story-media relationships, we will analyze two cases of stories that have moved among or unfolded across novels, comics, film, television, fanfiction, and games. Students will draw on critical methods learned via the case studies to develop a final project. Although the instructor has selected critical readings, students will collaboratively select stories that have been adapted into or developed across multiple media forms for the case studies. Fulfills genre and methods.

Postmodern/Fiction, Gillian Harkins

What is postmodernism? Or perhaps we should ask, what was postmodernism? In the later twentieth century, critics coined the term “postmodernism” to describe a cluster of intellectual, cultural and aesthetic experiments allegedly marking the end or limits of modernist representation. Few agreed on what precisely characterized postmodern ideas, arts and culture, or whether indeed something distinct or new was happening at all. Much of this discussion depended on how, or even whether, any given critic defined “modernism” as an intellectual/cultural/ aesthetic mode or more generally its tether to “modernity” as a broader historical concept. Debates about postmodernism foundered repeatedly on the question of modernity writ large: had the world-systems wrought through capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, and imperialism reached some kind of uncontainable crisis-point? If so, was this an “end” of some kind, in which case for what or for whom? Or was this merely a transformation without a predictable future, in which case what modes of living or forms of being might be emergent or resurgent? Were critical ideas, cultural forms and aesthetic modes relevant to these broader changes, and if they were, what kinds of approaches helped clarify the ways “fiction,” for instance, participated in world-historical changes of this kind?

This Honors seminar will return to these debates about postmodernism from the vantage points of 2025-26. We will primarily read later twentieth century works speculating on the ways a changing world impacted ideas, arts and culture, with a specific focus on literary fiction and its alleged role in revealing or remaking relations of power in moments of dramatic and declared change. Our core readings will be novels alongside critical and philosophical writings about modernity and its privileged modes of representation. Our aim in revisiting postmodernism will be to consider its relevance to our more recent present, including a possible turn to works written in the twenty-first century which explore similar themes and questions. More details will be available closer to the start of the 2025-26 academic year. Fulfills power and difference.

Advising and Administration

All new English Honors students are encouraged to meet and consult with the English Department faculty and staff members who administer the Honors Program:

Professor Stephanie Clare, Director of Undergraduate Programs and English Honors 
Padelford A-419; sclare@uw.edu 

Stephanie Clare receives applications, maintain academic progress files for Honors students. They are available to discuss intellectual topics, scholarly activities, and academic interests and plans with students. They also make decisions regarding student requests for exceptions to Honors policies and procedures, and reviews applications for readmission after dismissal.

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Graduation

Students who successfully complete both the College Honors and the English Honors programs will be graduated With College Honors in English . Students successfully completing the English Department Honors program only will be graduated With Honors in English . These Honors are posted to the UW transcript. To graduate With Honors in English , students must complete all required English Honors courses and maintain a minimum UW cumulative GPA of 3.3 and UW English GPA of 3.7.

WARNING: Students who have not completed all Honors requirements by their scheduled graduation date must request that the graduation date be postponed if he or she still desires to graduate with Honors. Once the degree is posted, no changes can be made to the transcript, and Honors will be forfeited.

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Requirements and Satisfactory Progress

English Honors course work consists of two honors seminars (ENGL 494), one taken in Autumn and one in Winter, followed by the writing of an honors thesis in the Spring (ENGL 496).

Goals for the fall seminars: Provide students with the opportunity to immerse themselves in a closer and more complex study of a topic. Provide students with research skills that they can take forward into their thesis writing, including an introduction to the library collection with a research librarian.Provide students with an opportunity to write a longer piece of work – longer than is usually required of our undergraduates. This serves as a warm up for the thesis.

The winter quarter seminar: we offer two topic-based seminars that also have students practice understanding how research projects are conceptualized and produced. These seminars should also include some structured time for students to think forward towards their thesis. This could come in a few different ways. The final project could introduce students to proposal writing (for example, identifying research questions, methods, primary and second sources, genres, and audiences). Or one assignment might have students look back at the work they’ve conducted at the UW and pick out topics, themes, or questions that have interested them. The goal here is that they are supported to begin the thesis quarter with a concrete idea (notably, an archive and a question).

Goals for the winter seminars: Provide students with the opportunity to immerse themselves in a closer and more complex study of a topic and provide students with the opportunity to begin to conceptualize their thesis project or do metacognitive work on what they’ve done in their English courses to date so as to look forward towards their thesis.

A total of four honors seminars are offered each year, two in Autumn and two in Winter, taught by a total of four faculty members.

Two of the four honors faculty will elect to be available in the Spring to oversee the approximately 40 honors essays. There will be a meeting time and room scheduled for the thesis course(s), though the supervising faculty are free to organize the course as they would like.

Honors course work may not be “doubled up,” nor may the courses be taken out of sequence, though Honors coursework may overlap with English major requirements where appropriate.

If there is an incomplete grade or failing grade on the student’s record for the previous Honors course, they risk being dropped from the program. If at any time after admission a student’s grades fall below these minimum standards, they risk being dismissed from the program. Students who have been dropped for unsatisfactory scholarship may reapply for admission at a later date if minimum GPA requirements are attained. All second applications must be accompanied by a letter of petition and two letters of recommendation from English faculty.

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Applying Honors Courses to English Major Requirements

Honors students may use the credits from their fall and winter seminars for the fulfillment of their English major. Course descriptions of each seminar identifies towards which distribution areas the seminar can count. These course descriptions are found on this website, above.

Honors students will use ENGL 496 Major Conference for Honors as their 400-level senior capstone course.

We invite honors students (especially seniors who completed the program as juniors) to register for 400/500 level split classes the following year. Students can also take 400/500 level courses during the year that they complete the honors program. These courses will count towards the distribution areas of the major. Talk with Stephanie Clare (sclare@uw.edu) about the area your 400/500 course will fulfill, then a Humanities adviser will make the manual change on your record.

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ENGL 496: Major Conference (thesis) for Honors

There is no option to prepare a creative portfolio (of poetry or short stories, for example) for the honors thesis. We encourage majors on the CW track to take ENGL 493, 483, 484, 485, 486, and, if they like, to write a critical thesis that helps them to situated or contextualize their work.

Description of thesis: In general, there are two options for the thesis: (1) a research-based essay; (2) a public-facing project. Option #2 is offered at the discretion of the faculty members teaching the honors thesis seminar. Individual faculty members inform the DUS whether or not they want to offer option #2 before students apply to honors. Each year, this information is made clear on our website before students apply and to all students admitted in the program after they apply. When scheduling, the DUS and scheduler try their best to have one faculty member ready to support option

1) A research-based essay, usually 20-30 pages, double spaced

This option, which takes the traditional academic journal article as its model, is a complex piece of research-based literary analysis, criticism, theory, or other critical work related to English. Students are welcome to work in many areas of the discipline, including literary history, English language study (linguistics), rhetoric and composition, cultural studies, film studies, and other emerging areas. The essay should be accompanied by a bibliography of around 15 items.This essay option is highly recommended for students who plan to apply to PhD programs in the humanities.

Broadly speaking this thesis ought to include:

  • A clear, significant thesis that is fully developed, coherent, and free from major flaws in reasoning.
  • Arguments based on evidence.
  • An engagement in the "critical conversation" that takes the essay beyond a competent analysis of primary sources.
  • Authoritative use of secondary sources that does not use the arguments of others in place of original thought or amount to nothing but a review of the criticism.
  • A clear and consistent critical perspective that reflects an awareness of theoretical concerns.
  • Effective organization that demonstrates purposefulness, a logical progression of thought, and rhetorical skill.
  • Lucid and engaging prose style that is largely free from stylistic missteps and mechanical errors.
  • Correct documentation utilizing either MLA Handbook or Chicago Manual of Style.

2) A research-based project whose form goes beyond that of the traditional academic essay 

This option has two parts:

  1. The creation of a public-facing work of scholarship that identifies an audience and seeks to engage that audience in intellectual, aesthetic, affective, or political query. Examples include podcasts, exhibitions (digital or otherwise), journalistic writing, etc. This creation ought to be grounded in or based in research. It ought to be informed by literary analysis, criticism, theory, or other critical work related to English and be engaged in at least some area of the discipline, including literary history, English language study (linguistics), rhetoric and composition, cultural studies, film studies, and other emerging areas. The choice of form ought to be related to the function of the project. In other words, students choosing this option should have a clear idea of why their knowledge production ought to take this particular form.
  2. A 7-10 page paper, using MLA or Chicago style guidelines, that describes the process of creating the work, underlying the reasons for the choices the students made and the context for the work. The student ought to consider what audience they would hope to engage and how their creation might circulate in the world. This consideration ought to be informed by research. The paper ought to include a bibliography of about 15 items (including the items drawn on in the work created).

Note: Before choosing this option, students should assess their own skills in producing their chosen form, or they ought to have a clear plan of how they will develop these skills.

This thesis option ought to include:

  • A public-facing work that:
    • feels complete
    • brings curiosity and complexity to the issues discussed
    • seems to foster that curiosity for the chosen audience
    • Includes arguments, insights, or observations based on evidence
    • Effective organization that demonstrates purposefulness, a progression of thought, and skill
    • Uses the affordances of the chosen form
  • An essay that includes:
    • a clear, significant thesis that is fully developed, coherent, and free from major flaws in reasoning
    • Arguments, insights, or observations based on evidence
    • A clear discussion of the choice of form and its relation to audience and function.
    • Effective organization that demonstrates purposefulness, a progression of thought, and skill.
    • Lucid, masterful, and engaging prose style that is free from stylistic missteps and mechanical errors.
    • Correct documentation utilizing either MLA Handbook or Chicago Manual of Style.

Faculty Supervision and Registration for ENGL 496

Two of the four faculty who teach Honors Seminars during the year will be available to supervise the honors theses. A regular meeting time and room will be scheduled for the thesis course to meet. There are some occasions when working with another English faculty member makes sense. For example, if a student wishes to complete a thesis project in medieval studies, and already has a strong mentoring relationship with Professor Remley, and he has agreed to work with that student independently, that student must provide a written intellectual justification to The Director of Undergraduate Programs. If the DUS approves the proposal, the student will be asked to submit an approval form with Professor Remely's signature. The student will work with Professor Remley on the content of the thesis, but will still be required to register for and attend one of the sections of ENGL 496, Major Conference for Honors. ENGL 496 is designed to cover critical aspects of the research process. The proposal, abstract, outline, annotated bibliography, etc. It is also designed to provide Honors students with an audience of their peers for developing their research, providing students with an opportunity to workshop their research with their peers.

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The Value of English Honors

Before deciding to embark on English Honors, many students want to know what benefits the program confers. Naturally, successful completion of departmental honors means receiving an impressive additional credential. Particularly for students applying to graduate or professional school, graduating With Honors in English puts another attractive line on the curriculum vitae. However, this should not be the sole motivation for entering the Honors program, nor is it the most significant benefit.

Building community: The Honors Program is a means for students to build community within one of the largest and most diverse departments in the College of Arts and Sciences . Honors students inevitably share the common characteristics of active intellectual engagement, curiosity and a willingness to explore new topics and perspectives, and a strong belief in the intrinsic value of scholarship in our discipline. One of the goals of Honors is learning how to work effectively within a community of scholars, how to engage in a critical conversation with one's peers, how to negotiate a multiplicity of perspectives and intelligently stake out intellectual commitments. Honors should provide a more intimate "home" within the larger, vaguer framework of our rather ungainly major. By bringing 40 students together into a cohort and giving them multiple opportunities to meet and work together and with the 4-person faculty team, we hope that a strong sense of community will emerge.

Graduate School preparation: Although Honors can be of great value to any English major, the program is particularly beneficial to prospective graduate students. The advanced skills described above are precisely those needed by applicants to graduate and professional school. Honors also puts students in an ideal position to fulfill the requirements of a successful graduate school application. Strong letters of recommendation are sometimes difficult for UW students to get, even if they have a strong academic record, because their professors simply don’t know them well enough. Two quarters of seminar work and a term of intensive independent study means that faculty members get a very clear, detailed picture of their students’ abilities and accomplishments. This can translate into the effective letters of recommendation. Most graduate programs in English also require a critical writing sample, an essay of 12-20 pages, that is an extremely important part of the application. The Honors Program provides ample opportunities for producing essays suitable for use as a critical writing sample.

Students hoping to complete graduate degrees in English sometimes ask if it is “necessary” to do English Honors to be competitive. The answer to this question is: No. Many eligible students have compelling reasons for choosing not to participate in the program. The absence of Honors course work on the transcript will not damage the prospects of a student with a clear record of academic excellence.

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Other Honors

English Honors students are frequently eligible for other categories of honors at the UW. However, one type of honor does not necessarily imply the others. It is important to distinguish English Honors from

University Honors

University Honors is an umbrella term to designate all UW Honors programs. For a thorough explanation of the three different tracks in Honors-- Interdisciplinary Honors (core curriculum), Departmental Honors, and College Honors (combination of Interdisciplinary and Departmental Honors), please go to the University of Washington Honors Program web page,

The Honors Curriculum: Options and Requirements. 

High Scholarship Recognition

The following forms of recognition are awarded to first baccalaureate degree, matriculated students in residence. Undergraduate students in all colleges of the University are eligible regardless of membership in the Honors Program.

Quarterly Dean’s List : A high scholarship notation is made on the transcript of each undergraduate student who attains a quarterly GPA of at least 3.50 for 12 UW graded credits. “Dean’s List” is entered on the line below the quarter’s courses on the transcript and a congratulatory letter is sent from the dean of the student’s home school or college.

Annual Dean’s List : The following undergraduates receive yearly high scholarship recognition in the form of a certificate:

  • Undergraduates who have attended three quarters of the academic year (Summer through Spring) and who have achieved a cumulative GPA of 3.50 or higher in at least 12 graded credits in each of the three quarters.
  • Undergraduates who have attended the University for four quarters of the school year (Summer through Spring) with a 3.50 or higher GPA in 12 or more graded credits in each of three quarters, and a cumulative GPA of 3.50 for the four quarters combined.

Such students are recognized by the notation “Annual Dean’s List” following the last quarter’s grades for the year, and by a certificate of recognition from the dean of the student’s home school or college.

Baccalaureate Honors 

Baccalaureate honors ( summa cum laude, magna cum laude, cum laude ) are awarded at graduation based on GPA and other factors (see the Registrar's Office website for criteria). The University’s Faculty Council on Academic Standards Honors Subcommittee determines annually the proportions of the graduating class to receive baccalaureate honors. GPAs are then determined by the Committee and the Registrar's Office to yield the specified proportions within each undergraduate college. University minimum GPAs are specified for each baccalaureate honors level, and college GPA minima must at least equal annually stipulated University minima. (The Registrar's Office maintains the most recent GPA requirements .)

Medals 

First-year Medal. Annually, the sophomore having the most distinguished academic record for the first year of his or her program receives the first-year medal. The notation "First-year Medalist" is made on the transcript. Selection is based primarily on GPA, but the rigor and quality of the student's program are also considered. Only students who have earned 36 or more graded credits in residence at the UW will be considered for this honor.

Sophomore and Junior Medals. Annually, the junior having the most distinguished academic record for the first two years of his or her program receives the sophomore medal . The senior having the most distinguished academic record for the first three years of his or her program receives the junior medal . The notation "Sophomore Medalist" or "Junior Medalist" is made on the transcript. Selection is based primarily on GPA, but the rigor and quality of the student's program are also considered. Only students who have earned 40 or more graded credits in residence at the UW will be considered for these honors.

President's Medal. The President's Medal, which is conferred at commencement, recognizes the graduating senior who has the most distinguished academic record. Only students who have earned at least 90 credits at the UW may be considered. The notation "President's Medalist" is made on the transcript, under the name of the degree awarded.

Phi Beta Kappa 

Phi Beta Kappa is a national honorary organization whose purpose is to recognize and honor students with excellent undergraduate academic records. Requirements for election are established by each local chapter . The requirements are meant to ensure that members have had a quality liberal education; at the UW students in all colleges are welcomed if they meet these standards.

Election: Students do not apply to Phi Beta Kappa. Instead, the Registrar’s Office provides the UW chapter with the transcripts of all students who meet the credit and GPA requirements. The chapter then determines whether the general education and upper-division breadth requirements are met. If so, the student is mailed an offer of election.

Golden Key National Honor Society 

Golden Key is a national interdisciplinary academic honors organization whose purpose is to recognize and encourage scholastic achievement in all undergraduate fields of study. Golden Key seeks to bring together undergraduates, college faculty, and administrators in developing and maintaining high standards of education and in promoting voluntary service to school and community.

Election: Students are normally invited into Golden Key each Fall quarter on the basis of meeting credit and class rank criteria. At other times, students who have subsequently become eligible may contact the UW Golden Key chapter office for information.

Sigma Tau Delta

Members of the UW chapter of Sigma Tau Delta , an international English honor society, note that the society's purpose is to "confer distinction upon students of the English language and literature, while also providing an opportunity to create a sense of community in the department."

Previous Years' Topics and Faculty

2024 - 2025 Honors Program

Seminars: 

Fall Seminars

Marxist American Culture: Writing, Art, and Political Activism, Prof. Laura Chrisman 

The 1930s saw an explosion of cultural production by artists associated with revolutionary social movements. This course looks at a cross-section of that work, considering a range of innovative fiction, poetry, journalism, theory, and multimodal (textual/visual) materials. It involves close reading, archival research, and a willingness to interrogate the anti-communist assumptions that became entrenched in American political and academic life during the Cold War and continue into the 21st century. The course materials foreground the contributions of Black, Jewish, and women artists, and considers the at times conflicted and at times symbiotic relationship of modernist experimentation and social realism, the interplay of class, race, and gender, and the shifting meanings of 'the people' and 'the folk'. Primary texts may include works by Hugo Gellert, Margaret Walker, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Mike Gold, Richard Wright, Meridel Le Sueur, and Clifford Odets.

Fulfills Historical Depth or Power and Difference distribution area.

Race, Gender, and U.S. Pop Music after 1965, Prof. Douglas Ishii 

This Honors seminar will interpret and theorize a form of everyday culture: popular music. Its centrality to collective memory suggests its power to shape cultural imaginaries, yet its ubiquity belies its power to reflect and refract dominant ideologies. It is by now a truism that the history of U.S. pop music is a history of race. This seminar engages difference after the 1965 Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Immigration and Nationality Act, when sanctioned racism supposedly ended, through an intersectional analysis of pop genres to query histories of the present. Genre, as theorists of race, gender, and sexuality have illustrated, is not a value-neutral description, but is a system of classification that ties taxonomies of art to the taxonomies of people. We will ask: How do genres, despite music’s celebration as universal or transcendent, reveal contexts and tensions that linger in the act of listening? How do genre categories set expectations of what (and whom) we’re hearing as a result of institutions, industries, and social systems? How have artists, critics, and scholars addressed these prescriptive and limiting understanding of genres?

Taking specific genres as flashpoints, we will survey a range of scholarship, journalism, essays, interviews, albums, and music videos using cultural studies as a method toward unraveling how cultural power has been naturalized through constructions of difference. We will apply theoretical frameworks from across the study of language, literature, and culture to which you have likely been exposed, such as cultural materialism, Black feminism, new historicism, queer theory, and postcolonial thought. We will think about how writing about music engages multiple publics through multiple genres, as well as the relevance of cultural and literary studies toward that end. Assessments will apply the methodological concerns of this seminar, with the intention of practicing skills toward preparing for the Honors thesis.

Fulfills Power and Difference or Genre, Method, and Language distribution areas.

Winter Seminars

Literary Texts and Vernacular English, Prof. Colette Moore 

Literary texts are a unique resource for representing spoken varieties of English. In a practice that goes back as far as Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, authors have written poetry and fiction that uses spelling and grammar to recreate features of spoken language that diverge from "standard" written English: called dialect literature, dialect poetry, or nation language (a term offered by the Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite). Literary writing, therefore, can be a form of resistance; one that celebrates and promotes local and community-based kinds of English.

This course explores Anglophone literary works that depict global and local varieties of English in their use of language. The choice of language in literary works reflects the cultural legacy of power relationships: whose English gets centered in standardizing practices and whose English gets marginalized; by extension, the question of whose English is being represented and how it is depicted is critical to literary interpretation. We will encounter the cultural environments that frame language choice as a stylistic strategy, charting broad concerns such as nationhood, coloniality/decoloniality, diaspora, race, community, language contact, memory, and identity.

Dialect literature is not always approachable, as Debbie Taylor writes in The Guardian, "Reading work in dialect demands a commitment on the part of the reader, which is as much political as it is artistic. It requires us to stray off the beaten track of received pronunciation and mainstream literature, with its complete words and nicely structured sentences, and into [a] rough and ready linguistic world." But such choices can be engaging and entertaining as well; these works are powerful and fun to read. Authors and poets might include Edmund Spenser, Robert Burns, Mark Twain, Louise Bennett-Coverley, George Washington Harris, Tom Leonard, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Mutabaruka, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh. We will also look at some discussions of the place of vernacular literature in Kamau Brathwaite, William Wordsworth, Gloria Anzaldúa, Thomas Macaulay and others.

This class will satisfy the English major requirement for historical depth, pre-1945 or the genre, method, and language requirement.

Dystopia and the Question of History, Prof. Alys Weinbaum 

This seminar focuses on the relationship between history, memory, and literature by homing in on dystopian fiction, one of today’s most popular literary genres. “The question of history” in the course title ought not be construed as a single question but rather as a series of interrelated questions about how dystopian texts render actual history “uncanny” (Freud) and in other ways engage questions of individual and collective memory, historical narration, and debates about historiography. Of particular concern are fictional treatments of the histories and memories of Atlantic slavery, settler colonialism, the holocaust of World War II, and global ecological crisis. How and why do these events surface in dystopian texts and to what end? How are they disaggregated from each other and/or how are they imbricated, overlapped, or “constellated” (Walter Benjamin) and to what end?

Throughout the quarter we will pair a range of theoretical and critical writings on history, memory, and historiography with the novels on the table. These pairings will inform our collaborative exploration of the dystopian genre, the politics of narrativizing history, the relationship of literature to memory, the depiction of collective history and a range of other issues. While dystopian representations are often bleak, some scholars have argued that they can inspire social and cultural transformation by catalyzing unique forms of critical thinking about the present moment of reading. Overall, we will attempt to stay afloat by locating the liberatory impulses embedded within dystopian fictions and/or in our collective analysis of them.

Keywords: dystopian fiction, history, historical trauma and narration, collective history, memory and memoricide, Atlantic slavery, settler colonialism, ecological disaster, the holocaust of WWII, fascism.

Course Materials: It is up to you to independently acquire all the novels we will read in this course—they are readily available new and used and through the UW library. All articles and chapters on the syllabus will be available on Canvas.

Fulfills Genre, Method, and Language or Power and Difference distribution area.

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