The Department of English warmly welcomes qualified applicants who wish to pursue advanced study towards a graduate degree. We are a large department and value historical coverage of the field that has traditionally been the study of English and American literature: we also encourage innovative approaches to that study, and have an expansive sense of the topics it might cover. We teach in all areas and currently have particular research clusters among our faculty and graduate students in Medieval and Renaissance, modernist, post-colonial, Latino/Latina, American and African American literatures. We maintain close ties with the Department of Comparative Literature, with which we jointly organize a certificate in Poetics and Theory and an Advanced Certificate in Comparative Approaches to the Literatures of Africa, the Middle East, and the Global South (CALAMEGS), and with the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, while we also participate in offering an Advanced Certificate in Digital Humanities. In addition, our graduate students originate, organize and receive funding for their own working and reading groups, which currently include African American and African Diasporic Working Group; Critical Theory and Medievalisms; Cultures of War and the Post-War; Creative Writing; Digital Culture/s; the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Literature Working Group; Politics of Empowerment; Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium; Nonhuman(isms) Working Group; University On the Edge/ (re)Thinking the University; and the Organism for Poetic Research.
The English Department is planning a socially distanced graduate curriculum for Fall 2020. We are aiming for the strategic use of our classroom allocations to provide as robust an onsite experience as possible, while also allowing students who are unable to travel to New York City to engage in coursework remotely. While some graduate courses will meet online exclusively, many will meet in-person or combine in-person and online meetings. (Students who cannot travel to New York may register for in-person or blended courses and complete their coursework remotely.) At the same time, the department’s student/faculty Working Groups will continue to sponsor an exciting range of extracurricular workshops and events.