The Department of English is devoted to the critical study of literature and language, indeed to the study of creative expression of many kinds, including film and other media. We offer courses in all periods and genres of English, American, and Anglophone literature—poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama—as well as a wide array of classes in creative writing, film, media studies, journalism, rhetoric, and theater. The department joins critics, scholars, and artists in an environment that fosters interactive learning and teaching, with extensive opportunities to pursue internships and independent research.
Undergraduate majors may choose from four distinct tracks in the major—English Literature; Creative Writing; Theater; and Language, Media, and Communication—and we offer minors in English Literature, Creative Writing, Journalism, and Theater. Double majoring in English and another discipline—Physics or Music, History or Psychology—is readily managed. (For more information, see Undergraduate.) Our internationally recognized graduate program offers both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, and our alumni have gone on to academic careers at some of the nation’s most respected colleges and universities. (See Graduate.) The English Department maintains wide-ranging connections with other university programs in Film Studies, Comparative Literature, African-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Theater, and Literary Translation, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The department sponsors an annual literary reading series that has brought distinguished poets and fiction writers to campus. (See Plutzik Series.) We also regularly host lectures, conferences, workshops, and symposia on a wide variety of subjects of scholarly and general interest. >>>
The National Research Council ranks the University of Rochester English Department among the best PhD programs in the country.
Chronicle of Higher Education, “2010 Rankings: Doctoral Programs in America”
Click on the image above for a PDF version of the graph.
The winter 2011-12 issue of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly is now available.
Visit the journal at: www.blakequarterly.org.
Read a feature article about Stephanie Li’s new book, Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama, in Rochester Review.
NPR recently cited Jennifer Grotz’s The Needle as one of the five best books of poetry in 2011.
Click here to read the NPR story.
The University of Rochester now offers an interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Literary Translation Studies. For details on this new program, visit http://www.rochester.edu/college/translation/.
The William Blake Archive has published an electronic edition of The Pickering Manuscript (c. 1807). This edition follows An Island in the Moon as the second major project overseen by the Archive team from Rochester’s Department of English. Graduate student Rachel Lee was the lead editorial assistant on the project.
For details, please visit Blake Archive Updates.
Read a review of Kenneth Gross’s latest book, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, in the Sunday New York Times.
PhD student Joseph Vogel recently published Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson. Click here to read the Associated Press review.
Vogel recently visited Spike Lee’s graduate film class at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to present a lecture on Michael Jackson’s contributions to film.
The 2010-11 Lillian Fairchild Award has been presented to Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, composer and chair of the Composition Department at the Eastman School of Music. Click here for a poster with details.
The William Blake Archive recently published an electronic edition of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy E. The Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 80 copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies.
For details, please visit Blake Archive Updates.
The fall 2011 issue of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly is now available.
Visit the journal at: www.blakequarterly.org.
The William Blake Archive recently republished nine electronic editions of Blake’s water colors illustrating the works of John Milton. The republication is timed to take advantage of the Archive’s revamped search engines and the Virtual Lightbox.
For details, please visit Blake Archive Updates.
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, a Rochester-based journal devoted to the poet and artist and co-edited by Morris Eaves, has a new online presence. The web site was created by a team from River Campus Libraries, adapting the Open Journal Systems publishing model. The images on the home page draw from the wealth of prints and paintings in the William Blake Archive, also co-edited by Eaves.
Visit the journal at: http://www.blakequarterly.org.
Joel Burges (PhD Stanford University) joined the faculty of the English Department in July 2011. Before coming to Rochester, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include media studies, critical theory, cultural studies, and contemporary American literature. Click here to view his faculty profile.
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