UW English Department Giving Day Campaigns 2024:
The Power of 10(10) and Beyond
Whether we’re working with undergraduate or graduate students, UW’s Department of English promotes cultural understanding and participation through extensive reading, thoughtful intellectual inquiry, and rigorous academic, professional, and creative writing. Our internationally recognized faculty offer a variety of courses in literature, film, popular culture, digital media, composition, professional writing, and theory. We encourage all of our students to pursue studies that intrigue and challenge them.
Our aim in each of our campaigns below is less to raise huge dollar amounts than to get students excited to work on a shared project together; to promote a better understanding of what it's like to be a member of the English Department; and to see just how many people we can attract to this fundraising campaign! Donations as little as $1 are encouraged. Thank you for your support!
The English Writing Programs Campaign
The English Department touches nearly every UW undergraduate by providing a range of writing-intensive University Studies Program COM courses, including not just our most popular course, English 1010: College Composition and Rhetoric, but also exciting courses such at English 2020: Literature, Media, and Culture, English 4010: Professional and Technical Writing, English 4040: Rhetoric, Media and Culture, and many others. The English Writing Programs campaign invites interested students and instructors in our courses to design a short video around the theme "The Top 10 Things About Being a Freshman, Sophomore, or Upper-Division Student at UW." We want our donors—presumably friends and families of students in our courses—to hear from all student writers at important stages in their academic careers and learn more about their day-to-day lives at UW.
But we do more than teach general education writing courses—we also have a vibrant undergraduate major with tracks in literary studies, English studies, and creative writing, and four distinct graduate programs.
The Undergraduate English Major Campaign
This effort asks students in English 2025: Gateway to the English Major course and English 4999: Senior Seminar to develop videos on the theme of "Why Become an English Major?" Each English major who develops a video will receive a specially designed "Ask Me Why I Became an English Major" hoodie. Proceeds from this campaign will support English majors, the professional development and travel abroad experiences of students, and the department's broader fundraising goals.
On the graduate level, the department offers four distinct degrees: a low-residency, part-time online master’s degree for working professionals; a full-time, fully funded MA degree for on-campus students; a full-time, fully funded MFA degree for creative writers; and our brand new PhD in the Public Humanities.
The MFA Degree in Creative Writing Campaign
Our fundraising campaign for the MFA degree seeks to support student in our wide range of courses in fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid forms, and we have award-winning faculty who write novels and story collections, public dialogues, and philosophical meditations. We prepare our graduates to release books with prominent commercial and small-press publishers and to bring their prose passions to writing for scientific communities, for public radio, for political campaigns, and much more.
The Graduate Programs and PhD in the Public Humanities Campaign
Finally, this year our fundraising campaign for the wider graduate program focuses on supporting all of our students, but particularly our new full- and part-time students pursuing degrees in our exciting new doctoral program in the public humanities. For over a decade, English has been planning a PhD, and we are excited that UW has committed itself to bringing this program to fruition starting in fall 2024. In short, our vision is to develop a distinctive humanities doctorate focused on the public sphere: as the National Humanities Alliance notes, public humanities work seeks to extend the humanities beyond the ivory tower by engaging the public in conversations that inform contemporary debates, magnify community perspectives, preserve local cultures, and expand educational access. Such programs are the cutting edge of humanities education, because in addition to focusing on community engagement and thereby strengthening humanities programming statewide, they have the added benefit of preparing graduates for jobs beyond the academy. Funds donated to this campaign will support the research and travel experiences of doctoral students, as well as the public humanities projects that they develop that serve the wider community and become the seeds of their dissertation research.
