Cultural Studies in Literature Certificate

Through a focus on diverse North American texts through transnational perspectives, this certificate will enhance students’ ability to apply textual knowledge of gender, race, ethnicity, and cultures to professions, graduate programs, and courses of study that require cultural competency. Students will learn fundamentals in cultural studies theory through the core ENG 329 Cultural Studies in Literature course, which teaches them research methods and canonical approaches to cultural studies, including how to apply cultural criticism to literary texts. The electives in this certificate provide a foundation in specific ethno-cultural experiences and the experiences of those marginalized due to gender or sexuality as expressed through literary narratives and texts. This certificate program will thus give students an essential understanding of how to read, analyze, engage with, and teach texts across these diverse cultural traditions.

Program Learner Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this program, students will be able to:

• identify how the production and analysis of texts from minoritized groups (in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality) in North America shaped individual identity formation and cultural communities broadly;
• apply conceptual tools from the fields of literary and cultural criticism to understand the ways that cultural communities create solidarity networks, illuminate the struggle for rights, speak back to earlier cultural representations, and equip individuals with the means to combat exclusion;
• synthesize, through literary texts and criticism, works from writers outside the traditional Western literary canon to build new repositories of key terms and theories across a range of cultures and backgrounds;
• develop the basic mechanisms needed to explain and engage with diverse literary narratives to help prepare students to teach and discuss historical and contemporary issues of race, ethnicity, and sexuality in literary contexts; and
• demonstrate to employers and graduate programs the ability to draw on literary precedents to explain the histories of marginalization, institutional racism, and the oppression of those marginalized due to their gender or sexuality in North America and elsewhere.