Dear Prospective Graduate Student:
Welcome to the Web site for the University of Delaware's Graduate Program in English. We appreciate your interest, and we encourage you to explore this site to learn about the distinctive opportunities and resources that make graduate study at Delaware particularly rich and rewarding.
Our program is highly competitive, and students earn the MA and PhD in literature by studying with an internationally distinguished faculty of over fifty full-time professors. The members of our graduate faculty are highly productive scholars whose books and articles bring credit to our program and unique research opportunities and innovative courses to our students.
Like many graduate programs in English, we have strengths in a number of traditional areas of study (such as Renaissance and Colonial American). However, our program's strength is best defined by method, not historical period. Whether studying the impact of a new geographic consciousness in eighteenth-century America, the experience of Chinese immigrants in the American West, or religious non-conformity in 17th-century England, the members of our graduate faculty go beyond the literary text and into research libraries and archives in order to illuminate those texts and the cultural issues they address. This emphasis on archival research and material culture study is a distinctive part of studying English at Delaware , and it cuts across all of the traditional historical and national boundaries that normally define English studies.
To underscore our methodological strengths the department has instituted three Research Tracks in the PhD program: 1) Print and Material Culture, 2) Race and Ethnicity, and 3) Transatlantic/Transnational Studies. Students may elect to pursue one of these tracks over the course of their studies in our department (for more information see the Handbook). We have chosen to emphasize these three fields because they are ones that are not only points of emphasis in our department, but also across the University of Delaware. For example, students interested in the Race and Ethnicity track are encouraged to make use of the Paul R. Jones Collection of African American Art and the Ishmael Reed papers, both housed on our campus. For those students interested in Print and Material Culture, the Center for Material Culture Studies on campus would be an important resource. These research tracks were deliberately designed to cut across periods and national literatures. So wherever your interest lies, you will likely find faculty here who can lead you to exciting and unique research opportunities.
Because we understand that the academic job market is extraordinarily competitive, we admit a modest number of students each year (about a dozen). We emphasize the importance of producing original, publishable research and establishing a professional and varied teaching portfolio while in program. That way, when our students go on the market, they are poised to compete for good jobs. As a department, we have devoted a standing committee, the Job Placement Committee, to the task of preparing our MA and PhD students for the academic job search. We invite you to see the results in our excellent placement record.
Our program is housed in Memorial Hall, the most beautiful building on campus, located at the center of the University of Delaware's historic Green. But the real virtue of our location is its proximity to the cultural and academic resources of the East Coast. From Memorial Hall, you can drive (or take the train) to Philadelphia in under an hour, New York in two, and Washington in just ninety minutes. Our students and faculty, therefore, supplement the considerable resources that Delaware offers by making day and weekend trips to these nearby cities.
To learn more about our program, please explore this site and do not hesitate to contact me if you have further questions or would like to discuss the prospect of graduate study in English at Delaware.
Sincerely,
Edward Larkin
Edward Larkin
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of English