All English majors design and complete an individualized Senior Experience via one of four opportunities:

  • The Senior Seminar in Creative Writing (English 498)
  • The Senior Seminar in English (English 499)
  • A Humanities Senior Seminar (Humanities 497)
  • An Independent Study project (English 490)

The Senior Seminar in English, the Senior Seminar in Creative Writing, and the Senior Independent Study all require student application and departmental approval and offer venues in which students research and write individually designed theses. The Humanities Senior Seminar generally focuses on a single major work or author; students read contextualizing texts and secondary criticism, meet with visiting scholars and compose and present a substantial paper or final project.

Students regularly archive their senior experience projects online at Academic Commons, so if you're already a WU student and would like some examples, head on over and check them out!

Recent Humanities Seminars

Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; Shakespeare, King Lear; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; James Joyce, Ulysses; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.

Willamette University

English

Address
900 State Street
Salem Oregon 97301 U.S.A.
Phone
503-370-6061

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