English

Program Offered: Ph.D.
http://ase.tufts.edu/english/graduate/
617-627-3459

The Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in English is intended for students interested in academic careers at universities and colleges.

Doctoral candidates must first earn a Master of Arts (M.A.) either at Tufts or elsewhere. Although all students are evaluated at the end of their first year, M.A. candidates are expected to proceed to the Ph.D. There is no terminal master’s program.

The graduate program is designed both to give students a broad knowledge of English, American, and Anglophone literature and literary theory, and to allow them to explore their own interests in depth. Recent graduate seminars have included Art and Literature of the Black Atlantic World; Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism; The Sen­timental Moment; New Histories of Reading: Text Forms and Literate Practice; and Forms of Desire in Early Modern England. Students may take ap­proved courses in other Tufts departments and have the option to enroll in courses at neighbor­ing universities through a consortium of graduate schools in the Boston area.

Faculty expertise spans an impressive range of historical periods, authors, literary and aesthetic movements, and critical discourses. Special interests include interdisciplinary approaches to cultural studies; ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies; postcolonialism; and literary theory.

All students receive fellowships with no teaching responsibilities during their first year. Students entering with an M.A. are generally offered six semesters of teaching in succeeding years. Students who earn their M.A. at Tufts receive an additional year of support in their second year, during which they are mentored in teaching by professors and advanced graduate students. They begin their six semesters of funded teaching the following year.

The Ph.D. program includes a comprehensive oral examination and concludes with a disserta­tion. Recent titles have included, Lost in London or, a Study of Early Urban Gothic Literature; Tell Me a War: Presidential Narratives on the Eve of Conflict, 1916–2003; Peripheral Visions: Picturing Human Bodies in American Literature and Visual Culture, 1900–1919; Making Love: Sexuality and the Construction of British Modernism; and The Queen of Proofs: Subjectivity, Gender, and Confession in Early Modern England.

Since 1992, graduates of the Ph.D. program have secured teaching jobs at a rate that well exceeds the national average for the field.

Students can also participate in the student-run Tufts English Graduate Organization (TEGO). The group coordinates professional development workshops on topics ranging from publishing in academia to creating a curriculum vitae; matches first-year students with more seasoned peers through a mentoring program; and hosts an annual graduate student conference. Held each fall, the conference includes research presentations by Tufts English graduate students and graduate students from colleges and universities in the United States and other countries.

Doctoral candidates must demonstrate a reading knowledge of two foreign languages in order to complete the program.

English: Faculty

Elizabeth Ammons
Ph.D., University of Illinois
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, race studies, U.S. literature and social justice

Linda Bamber, Director of First-Year Writing Program
Ph.D., Tufts University
Women and literature, Shakespeare

Jay Cantor
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz
History of consciousness, modernism, creative writing

Kevin Dunn
Ph.D., Yale University
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, Shakespeare, biblical literature, politics and literature

Lee Edelman
Ph.D., Yale University
Literary theory (queer theory, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism); film studies; twentieth-century British and American literature

Sheila Emerson, Emerita
Ph.D., Rutgers University
Victorian literature

Carol Flynn, Emerita
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Eighteenth-century British literature

John Fyler
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Chaucer, medieval British literature

Judith Haber, Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Early modern literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies

Andrea Haslanger
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Restoration, eighteenth-century British literature, romantic literature and culture

Sonia Hofkosh
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
British romantic literature, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual culture, feminist theory

Joseph Litvak, Chair
Ph.D., Yale University
Nineteenth-century British literature, literary theory, Jewish cultural studies

Lisa Lowe
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz
Comparative literature, European and American studies

John Lurz
University of California, Berkeley
Modern British literature

Modhumita Roy
Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook
World literature in English

Christina Sharpe
Ph.D., Cornell University
Twentieth-century American literature; multiethnic literature; black literary, visual and cultural studies

Ichiro Takayoshi
Ph.D., Columbia University
Twentieth-century American literature, Asian-American literature

Jonathan Wilson
Ph.D., Hebrew University of Jerusalem
American literature, creative writing