English
Welcome to the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg, located in Treaty 1 territory. We offer a wide range of courses and a number of different undergraduate degree programs that offer students the opportunity to specialize in English Literature, Creative Writing, Young People's Texts and Cultures, and Screen Studies, and an M.A. in Cultural Studies. Our faculty is composed of highly qualified professors who are committed to their students, to diverse research interests, and to the importance of literature, language, and culture as forms of knowledge. The English Department is an active, continually evolving place. We house the student-run literary journal Juice and the Carol Shields and Jake MacDonald Writer-in-Residence Programs. We are also affiliated with the Centre for Research into Young People's Texts and Cultures (CRYTC) and the scholarly journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.
The Department of English at the University of Winnipeg unequivocally supports the right to free speech of its members as defined in Article 7 of the UWFA Collective Agreement with RAS, and Article 5 of the UWFA Collective Agreement with CAS. We are a Department that includes, among others, Indigenous, Black, Asian, Jewish, Arab, and Global South scholars, creative writers, staff, and students, some with direct experience of living under colonialism and occupation, who specialise in Critical Race Studies, Genocide Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Decolonial Studies, Black Studies and Indigenous Studies. Many of our members are antiracist scholars who strive for meaningful equity in their pedagogy. These areas necessarily entail critiques of settler colonial formations and of acts of genocide, both in the past and in the present.
As Articles 5.4 and 7.02 state, “Academic freedom does not require neutrality. Rather, academic freedom makes commitment possible and may result in strong statements of beliefs and positions. The credibility and acceptability of the principle of academic freedom depends in part upon the freedom being used in a manner consistent with the scholarly obligation to base research and teaching on an honest search for knowledge.”
We affirm and support the rights of our members and students, many of whom live and work in Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Red River Métis, coming from all over the world, and who have also experienced colonialism, genocide, and occupation, to engage in these areas of study freely and without censure.
