The requirements for an MA degree in English consist of 21 credit hours in courses numbered 300 or above, successful completion of a comprehensive examination, and a thesis along with any additional prerequisite courses determined by the department to make up for deficiencies in undergraduate preparation.
Students working for an
MA degree in English Language must take English 301, 327, 341 or 342, and 345. Two additional elective English Language graduate courses from among those offered in the department must be taken. Students must take a further graduate course, which may be from outside the English language course offerings, subject to departmental approval.
Students working for the degree of MA in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) should refer to the Department of Education catalogue section.
Students working for an
MA degree in English Literature must complete English 301. In addition, they must take one course from each of the following three categories: Literary History, Comparative Literature, and Literary and Cultural Studies. Of the remaining three courses, two may be taken outside the Literature program, subject to departmental approval.
For more information about the MA program in English Language and Literature, click
here.
Also, check out the
MA Graduate flyer.
Draft description of the graduate courses for FALL 2025 - 2026
ENGL 301A: Introduction to Bibliography and Research Methods
Professor Sonja Mejcher-Atassi
Overview
Why do literary studies matter and what do we do in literary studies? What are our objects and
methods of inquiry? What are our resources? What kind of material do we work with?
This course accompanies you through your first steps in our graduate program in English
Literature as we set out to explore these questions. Its aim is twofold: First, to familiarize you with
the resources available in the field of literary studies and with key components of a research project, such as finding a research topic and narrowing it down, drafting research questions and framing them theoretically, writing an annotated bibliography and a literature review, and formulating an argument with which you enter a scholarly conversation. Second, to explore the very material we work with in literary studies: texts, books, libraries, and archives. In this context, we critically reflect on our very reading and writing practices and changing notions of text and author. Like all of our graduate courses, this is a reading and writing intensive course. The required reading listed in the weekly schedule below is subject to change, depending on your input and course progress.
ENGL 302M Tm.Medieval&Renaissance Lyric
Professor Devan Ard-Keyser
Overview
This course surveys lyric poetry written in English from approximately 1300-1600. We will consider the critical significance of lyric within the larger canon of early English literature by thinking about its near generic others – prayer, petition, and song – and by engaging with recent developments in lyric theory. How or where is lyric construed as a distinctive mode of expression in early Britain? What is the place of this corpus within the broader English lyric “tradition”? What discontinuities mark off “medieval lyric” from “early modern” or “Renaissance”? Through this inquiry, we will grapple with the interrelated problems of historicist methodology, monolingual canon formation, and disciplinary organization.
310C: Tm.Adapt.Shakesp: Media& History
Professor Joshua Gonsalves
Overview
This course will attempt to defamiliarize Shakespeare by resituating three tragic texts (Macbeth Hamlet & Othello) in a wholly different medium than the stage or literature (since Samuel Johnson and Coleridge Shakespeare’s value as cultural touchstone and legitimating trope is located in re-reading = “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”)—i.e., film adaptations.
Before doing so we will define the generic media that these three texts negotiate—tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy—in terms of historical, theoretical and critical precedents. In keeping with our defamiliarization agenda, we will focus on a Roman tragedy by Seneca, the violent Thyestes, forerunner of both the bloodbaths staged by the Early Modern Revenge Tragedy (of which Hamlet as well as the other two tragedies partake: “Out, damned spot: out I say;” Macbeth 5.1.35) and current horror, slasher and giallo genres, as well a contemporary partaker in the ultra-aestheticized live deaths staged by Roman gladiatorial media via “a technology of blood-bags…employed to squirt artificial blood for the audience’s delectation, catering at once to cravings for realism and sensationalism” (Dana F. Sutton, Seneca on the Stage, 1986, 67). Senecan tragedy will offer a key contrast to the civic-minded religious rituals of Athenian tragedy