The Department of English and Technical Communication offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs in English and technical communication. A wide range of courses are offered in writing, linguistics, technical communication, and literature by experienced and accomplished faculty.

The department has more than twenty-five faculty members, including current and emeritus professors. The faculty’s research interests include horror fiction and film, Southern culture, the history of technical communication, American culture in the 1920s, Victorian literature, early modern British literature, usability studies, visual communication, diffusion of technology, and original poetry. Members of the faculty also have numerous publications to their credit.

The degrees offered by the department are B.A. in English, B.A. in English education (comes with a teaching certification), B.S. in technical communication, a cooperative M.A. in English, and M.S. in technical communication. The department also offers undergraduate minors in literature, American studies, writing, literature and film, and technical communication and a graduate minor in technical communication.

Students who graduate with one of our degrees have a variety of career options: teaching, administration, government service, publishing, and journalism, among others.

The department sponsors a chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the National English Honorary Society, and provides advisors for publications such as the Missouri Miner (Missouri S&T’s student newspaper) and Southwinds (Missouri S&T’s student literary magazine).

Department History

Enlarged View

Missouri S&T (formerly called UMR) has offered degrees in English since 1967. English was part of the Department of Humanities until a separate English department was created in 1984. The first chair of the Humanities department was Dr. Jim C. Pogue, and the first chair of the English department, when it was formed in 1984, was Dr. James Wise.

Missouri S&T has been offering technical writing courses for decades, but the B.S. and M.S. degrees in technical communication are relatively new, having been established in 2005. At about the same time, the Department of English became the Department of English and Technical Communication.