The 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: Aesthetics, Form, 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.
Text and Medium is new. But it evolves from longstanding departmental interest in editorial theory and practice--areas of significant strength for at least 50 years. Once looked upon as largely practical, editing took on major status and visibility during recent decades as scholars began to draw on the vast untapped potential of its fundamental questions: Under what precise circumstances and in what precise forms has information been embodied and transmitted in the past? And how should it be transmitted in the future?
English Department faculty at the University of Rochester have been at the forefront of these developments, helping to illuminate the way editorial decisions involve basic issues in the nature, shape, transmission, and preservation of information–ultimately, nothing less than the organization of knowledge. Departmental research and teaching in this area contribute to our understanding of how different media–oral, visual, aural, dramatic, cinematic, electronic–distinctively shape the "messages" that English delivers to its audiences. The astounding literary achievements of the last 500 years in printed stories, poems, plays, and novels have sometimes obscured the role of other media of communication and preservation: oral song; scripted and improvised performance; drawn, engraved, and digitized images; and recorded, filmed, videotaped, and digitized composites. The department’s investments in film studies, beginning in the early 1970s, and, more recently, in media studies, media history, and theater have extended our intellectual reach. Current approaches combine new technologies with broad aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests. Crossover work of this kind opens new engagements with, for example, African American, Asian American, and Native American narrative traditions and their place within living communities; the effect of etched, hand-colored amalgams of text and image produced by multimedia artists such as William Blake; the narrative and technical elements that contribute to the appeal of genre films such as science fiction; or the function of visual materials in medieval and early modern literature.
Aesthetics and the analysis of form demarcate a crucial aspect of human knowledge and experience. Affective experience and formal analysis shape our sense of human interrelations, our engagements with common and divergent pasts and presents, and our interrogation of the texts and artifacts of a continuously renegotiated common culture. Formal analysis raises powerful questions about the evocation of passion, of memory and of experience, and about the nature of writing and the importance of art. These concerns include the study of how forms of imagination evolve through history; how they reflect and focus significant changes in thought, religion, politics, science, economics, and technology; how literature, film, and other media shape our narratives about the past and the present; how they move, amuse, disturb, or please us. Work in this field probes the shifting definition of what artistic expression is and does, especially as this is defined by the creation of specific canons and traditions in literature, film, and in newer media, by the establishment and transformation of aesthetic categories, and by broad continuities and specific changes in the nature of our interpretive practices. Professors and students interested in Aesthetics, Form, and History examine the ways in which artistic expression articulates what we call a culture (in all its diverse objects, from canonical masterpieces to popular entertainments, and all its varied settings from regional to national to transnational). They seek to examine the ways in which works engage their audiences cognitively and emotionally. Direct encounters with the work of art, practical criticism, and theoretical arguments, all have a place in exploring how sensibility and taste come into being and how they relate to broader currents of thought and debate in art, ethics, politics, and society.
Contemporary Writing brings together a wide range of work centered on the literary practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The department has attracted graduate students and faculty with highly developed interests in modern and contemporary literature, culture, theater, and film, and its faculty includes scholars of both modernism and later twentieth century literature, and distinguished fiction writers and poets. Fiction writers Joanna Scott (MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Lannan Literary Award, Pulitzer Prize finalist) and Stephen Schottenfeld, poet James Longenbach ("Discovery" Award from The Nation) and others on the faculty continue the department's long line of illustrious writers. The newly opened Hyam Plutzik Library of Contemporary Writing, which houses the William and Hannelore Heyen collection of manuscripts, broadsides and first editions of twentieth century poetry, a remarkable collection containing thousands of items, provides unique research opportunities for the advanced study of contemporary writing. The department's Plutzik Memorial Reading Series is coordinated with courses in contemporary literature, and in recent years, students have had the opportunity to interact with such notable writers as Louise Glück, Robert Pinsky, Salman Rushdie, Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, William Kennedy, Michael Ondaatje, Grace Paley, and Mark Strand. The ongoing project of contemporary writing is thus an integral part of the research and teaching of the department.
Graduate seminars for creative writing offer special opportunities for students to combine literary scholarship with the development of their own writing. With a strong research profile in twentieth-century literature and culture and contemporary critical theory, and with unique resources for advanced study, Contemporary Writing has proved to be one of the department's leading fields for graduate study.
