Graduate Studies in English at Rochester

he MA and PhD programs at the University of Rochester offer students the scholarly resources and intellectual energy of a major research institution in an environment that permits close personal attention and open exchange. Graduate students interact with a faculty of active scholars and teachers whose publications and professional engagements continue to earn the English Department national and international recognition. The current English department faculty includes six Guggenheim Fellows, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, as well as recipients of numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Lingua Franca identified the University of Rochester as one of the country's leading programs in cultural studies and in film theory; these areas of research strength function as part of a department centrally committed to historically based literary study across the full range of British and American literatures, and they complement the department's history of strength in medieval studies, modern literature, text editing and theory, and creative writing. A number of important scholarly journals are based in the English Department at Rochester, including Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly and the Blake Archive online hypertext project (in cooperation with the University of Virginia, the Getty Foundation, and the Library of Congress). The Chaucer Bibliographies series (published by the University of Toronto Press) is located in the department, as is the Medieval English Text Series, published by the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS). Graduate course offerings reflect the diversity of intellectual interests in the department—interests which include not only the traditional areas of literary study, but also such fields as African American studies, cultural studies, gender studies, film and media studies, rhetoric and literacy.

Among the more distinctive features of the department is its sustained commitment to interdisciplinary research and teaching. Drawing on the particular convergences of research and teaching strength in the department and on distinctive resources and research opportunities for graduate study, the department encourages graduate students to design their programs in relation to one or more of three broadly-based areas of scholarship: Literature and History, Contemporary Writing, and Text and Medium. These are not designed to replace traditional areas of training and expertise (such as Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, American, African American, Film) but rather to complement them by providing additional contexts through which field-specific literary studies can be pursued.