English Student Opportunities
English students at Carthage have many opportunities to win scholarships, hold internships, study abroad, exercise their writing skills, and attend literary programs and performances.
J-Term
J-Term is a month-long period of study in January in which all academic departments at Carthage offer innovative courses on campus as well as study tours in other countries. Recent study tours offered by the English Department include An Ecological and Cultural Writing Tour of Puerto Rico. Recent on-campus courses include “Walking, Writing, Winter,” a poetry course that combines creative writing and winter walks through Kenosha’s January landscape; and Literature In Its Time II: “Victorians Gone Wild,” a course that examines science writing and fictions about science in 19th-century British literature.
Student Organizations: Writing, Reading and More
Carthage English majors can hone their writing and critical reading skills in any number of organizations on campus. Students interested in creative writing can join Poetry Underground or Centrique, Carthage’s creative arts journal. Students interested in journalism can join the student newspaper, The Current, or yearbook.
See student organizations popular with English students
Sigma Tau Delta
Sigma Tau Delta is the international English Honor Society. The Carthage chapter meets to promote and involve members in literature, poetry, and theatre. With more than 900 chapters nationwide and more than 9,000 members inducted annually, Sigma Tau Delta is a wonderful way to become more involved in the Carthage community and make connections with scholars across the world.
Stratford Festival
See up to five Shakespearean plays at the internationally recognized Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada. The English Department leads students and faculty from multiple academic disciplines to the festival every fall.
Awards and Scholarships
The English Department awards several scholarships each year to recognize and support students who have done outstanding academic and creative work. Scholarships include the Altera Scholarship, Chapin-Tague and Juanita Jones Awards in Creative Writing (given each year in prose and poetry), Centrique Founders Award (given each year to the best writing and art published in Centrique), Dawe Scholarship, Shakespeare Festival Award, Tolleson Scholarship, and Vorpahl Scholarship. The department also offers departmental fellowships, among other honors.
Carthage Writing Center
Many English students apply to work in the Carthage Brainard Writing Center, which is staffed by student writing fellows and is a free resource available to all members of the Carthage community. Whether you need help figuring out what to write about, formulating a thesis statement, organizing your thoughts, or polishing your final draft, the Writing Center can help. The center tutors students from all majors, at all levels of ability and any stage of the writing process.
Visiting Writer’s Series
Carthage hosts acclaimed writers from across the country in our Visiting Writers Series. In recent semesters, the series has welcomed more than a dozen great fiction writers and poets, including Anne Waldman, Danielle Evans, David Trinidad, Kate Greenstreet, Duriel Harris, Padma Viswanathan, Geoffrey Brock, Lisa Fishman, Julie Carr, Jared Stanley, and Catherine Theis.