Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film

Cultivate and expand your talents in creative writing or filmmaking. Fulfill your passion for studying literature or film. The Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film offers multiple majors in a community atmosphere dedicated to learning and creating. Our award-winning faculty provide engaged interactions that foster critical thinking, conversation, and inquiry, while strengthening your research and problem-solving skills and honing your creative and communicative abilities.

The OU Pledge is the university’s commitment to providing undergraduate students with the opportunity for meaningful, hands-on learning. The Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film offers courses with experiential learning in both formal and regular settings and occasional one-time experiences.

• Students taking film production courses begin working on making films from Filmmaking I (FLM 1600) through Filmmaking Thesis (FLM 4999).
• The same is true for our Creative Writing Program. Students at all levels from the introductory Creative Writing Courses (Introduction to Prose/Poetry Writing, CW 2100; Introduction to Screen/TV Writing, CW 2400) to Advanced Workshops in Fiction (CW 4200) or Memoir and Essay. 
• There are also plenty of other, equally exciting experiential learning opportunities you could find in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film. For example, our classes have been known to ask students to study actual trees (or animals) to take notes about what happens over time to them, and compare that with poetry and research about trees.
• We recently offered a course on the culture of oil, and students went to engineering labs that were making cars for races.
• Other classes give students experiences of Indigenous ways of keeping records. Some classes invite students to visit archives in Detroit of activist writers as part of an exploration of how living in Detroit helped them connect to traditions of American literature. 
• Students in our English Language Arts for Educators program combine rigorous coursework with a full year of field experience to prepare them for their own careers.
• On top of all this experiential learning in our classes, all three programs are designed in models that stress the production of knowledge, rather than absorbing it or taking it in. Students in film studies classes, for example, do not just learn about films, they practice the kind of analytical writing that professional film critics and scholars do. In the same way, students in literature courses use the knowledge they learn about literature to produce their own writing that doesn’t just repeat what they have learned in class, but, by applying the analytical skills and thinking they develop in class, create their own analyses of plays or poems or fiction.