The English department has been functioning from the beginning of this college.The Department of English houses a vibrant, diverse, and engaged faculty. Our publications, classrooms, and service are centered on the study of literature, film, and culture, demonstrating how rigorous attention to textuality opens up readers to the large questions that face humankind. The close study of cultural texts, we assert, offers the most humane and sensitive opportunity to articulate those compelling questions. As a faculty, we guide our undergraduate students down paths of discovery, not only about themselves as agents and meaning makers, but also about others whom they may experience as different from themselves. Through the mediation of literature and film, which facilitates sympathy and the imaginative inhabiting of the unfamiliar, students find ways to connect across cultural differences. We listen to our undergraduates, pushing them to challenge and thereby refine their interpretative skills. In the process, students become clear and effective communicators who can take into account the vagaries and vicissitudes of language. We engage our undergraduates’ curiosity and pleasure in literary and cinematic texts, and we encourage them to question how these texts work to create intellectual and emotional meaning.