Our full-time and part-time faculty members work together to offer two complete majors, two minors, eight interdisciplinary majors and minors, and a world-class online magazine, Subnivean. With a choice of in-depth study in literature, creative writing, and publishing, our students benefit from our faculty's pursuit of the ongoing transformations that are the new humanities. 

We offer students a rich diversity of courses and a multitude of extra-curricular opportunities in intimate settings: big ideas and ambitions in small seminars and workshops, a unique hands-on publishing experience staffed by our students, writing projects that connect students with local business or educational partners, and professional interactions with visiting writers and artists.

Literary Studies

Around the world, people are writing and reading at unprecedented levels.  The creators, conditions, and kinds of literature have changed and so have we.

Our innovative and trend-setting curriculum balances a care for the literary heritage of English with the experience of contemporary literary experimentation and interpretative theories.  Language and literature open us to one another and to ourselves, and our active and publishing faculty can open you to the social, economic and political challenges of writing and interpretation under new conditions of technology, media and globalization.  Questions?  Contact Patricia Clark at patricia.clark@oswego.edu

Creative Writing

Recognized as one of the nation's premiere programs designed exclusively for undergraduates, Creative Writing offers introductory, intermediate and advanced instruction in poetry, fiction, graphic storytelling (comics & graphic novels), screenwriting, and creative nonfiction.

Like our faculty, many of our graduates are now practicing and published poets, novelists, playwrights, screenwriters and essayists.  But plenty of our alums are also lawyers, teachers, librarians, advertising execs, editors and a host of other occupations - all of them with exceptional writing skills.  If writing is your passion, contact Laura Donnelly laura.donnelly@oswego.edu

Subnivean: A Global Online Journal 

What do Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler, luminary author Arisa White, U.S. Poet Laureate Emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, and SUNY Oswego's creative writing students have in common? Subnivean. This globally-acclaimed digital literary publication was developed to equip our undergraduates with a firsthand publishing experience — and to amplify their voices in today's literary dialogue. 

Subnivean is staffed by students who serve in professional roles including Student Editor-in-Chief, Fiction Editor, Poetry Editor, Social Media Ambassador, Event Manager and more. The publication does not publish SUNY Oswego student work, but rather, is published by SUNY Oswego students, who showcase the work of established and emerging authors writing in the U.S. and beyond.