Harvard's English Department

It maybe strange to count "English" as part of "Area Studies" - but if Celtic Languages and Literatures is "Area Studies," it is hard to say English is not.

Brief analysis of the courses offerred:

1. Well, for anyone entering Harvard, there is no need to learn Elementary English as one might want to do for Russian, Arabic, or Sanskrit. "Creative Writing" classes in this context is probably the equivalent of more "language" class as in "Languages and Literature" - this is another way to say that since English department really teaches "English Language and Literature" - it would be right to consider it as an instantiation of "Area Studies,"

2. With 79 Literature courses, I pick out many names in course titles:

Beowulf (2), Milton's Paradise Lost (2), Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Bishop, Shaw, Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare (3), The Brontes, Spenser's Fairie Queen, Nabokov, David Foster Wallace, Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Homer, Star Wars, Chaucer's The Cantebury Tales, Thomas Hardy, Conrad, Naipaul, Coetzee.

3. What other languages do one need to know besides English to get a Ph.D. degree? "A reading knowledge of two languages is required. Students will be expected to show proficiency in either two ancient languages, or two modern languages, or one ancient and one modern language. Normally, Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, and Italian are the accepted languages."