Overview:

The program aims to provide research skills, background in critical theory and methodology, advanced knowledge in British, American, or Anglophone literatures and languages, and expertise in a specialized area of study within the field of English. Our program mainly prepares graduate students for academic careers at colleges and universities, but several of our graduates have entered related professions and research fields. We offer students the following degree options: MA: Literature Concentration, Ph.D.: Literature Concentration, Ph.D.: WHiT Concentration (Writing History and Theory).

The Department faculty’s research and teaching cover a broad range of interests, with strength in the following areas of study: Modern American Literature; Early Modern Literature; Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century British Literature; British Modernism; Critical Theory; Cultural Studies; Gender Studies; Film; Rhetoric and Composition. The graduate faculty offers extensive preparation in Methods for Literary Research and in Literary Theory.

Specific ongoing faculty research projects include studies in:

• authorship and intellectual property
• authorship and impersonality in Anglo-American fiction
• biography & autobiography
• composition, theory and pedagogy
• creative writing and journalism
• cultures of exhibition
• detective fiction
• Early Modern English Republicanism
• film history, genres, and reception
• history of narrative
• identity in Chinese and Jewish American literature
• literary translation
• literature, empire, and globalization
• literature and the visual arts
• medical rhetoric
• minority literature
• new media and digital rhetoric
• print culture and eighteenth-century literature
• Queer theory
• rhetorical theory and the cognitive sciences
• selfhood’s histories
• Victorian literature and psychology
• visual rhetoric
• World Literature