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 2026 - 2027
ENGL 301A: Int. Introduction to Bibliography and Research Methods
Professor Yasmine Khayyat
Overview:
Why do literary studies matter in our world today? What do we actually do in literary studies — what are our objects, our methods, our resources? What kind of material do we work with? And to what end do we study literature at all? This seminar accompanies you through the first steps of your graduate work in English literature. Its aim is twofold. First, to familiarise you with the resources of the field and with the moving parts of a research project: finding a topic and narrowing it, framing it theoretically, building an annotated bibliography and a literature review, and formulating the questions and the argument with which you enter a scholarly conversation. Second, to examine the material we work with — texts, books, libraries, archives — and to reflect critically on our own practices of reading and writing, and on the changing notions of text, author, and evidence that those practices assume.
Two conditions shape the seminar this year. The first is that questions about authorship, originality, and the making of knowledge are no longer only historical: generative AI has made them immediate and practical, and we take them up as objects of study rather than as a disciplinary emergency. The second is that libraries and archives in our region are under active threat. This seminar asks what it means to research, catalog, and remember when the record itself is being destroyed.
ENGL 306AG: Tm. Diasporic Arab Writings Today
Professor Syrine Hout
Overview:
This course explores 7 post-war Anglophone Lebanese, Arab North American, and Arabophone Lebanese novels by five authors who either witnessed at least some major atrocities of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) during their formative years (childhood and adolescence) or grew up in diasporic locations while maintaining strong ties to Arab/Middle Eastern cultures. Readings span 23 years (1998–2021) and include narratives by Rabih Alameddine, Rawi Hage, Nada Awar Jarrar, Hilal Chouman, and Rayyan al-Shawaf. These texts will be read under 3 main but also interrelated topics as specified in the class outline/schedule. They will also be examined in parallel to literary historical, theoretical as well as text-specific critical essays, with an emphasis on home(ness) from psycho-social and national perspectives. How is home(land) redefined in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century transnational texts? This emergent body of mostly award-winning literature is being mostly produced in the Lebanese/Arab diasporas and addresses the interrelated themes of illness, exile, refugeeism, memory, nostalgia, nationalism, sexuality, militarization of the youth, personal versus collective identity, socio-economic class, gender and power relations, religion and sectarianism, political conflict and war. In addition to discussing these issues, with recourse to the extent possible to home(ness), some of the larger questions to be explored in class will revolve around the following aspects of hybrid/transnational literatures: the role of language, code-switching, place of production, reception, translation, circulation, and many others.
ENGL 310B: Introduction to Film Adaptation
Professor Joshua D. Gonsalves
Overview:
This course will trace how texts, contents and contexts from different global-locales are transposed in film. Beau Travail, for example, a French film in which the experience of African Colonialism speaks back to the Center, transposes Melville's Billy Budd, a 19th-century American novella, into diverse, contradictory and dissent-rich contexts. What, we will want to ask, are the consequences for reading-interpretation that follow from this displacement, as well as from the other specific conjunctures that we will be tracking? While this course will operate on a “meta”-level that will help students inter-process history, theory and text in terms of their own projected projects, it will also focus on specifics—the international travails of the melodrama— focusing, in particular, on the globalization of its film noir incarnations