The Graduate Program

Program Overview

The University of Missouri-Columbia English department is dedicated to the study of English language and literature in all of its various historical, cultural, and theoretical aspects. Created in 1881 as part of the humanities division in the College of Arts and Science, the English Department houses over forty full-time faculty members and over a hundred graduate students enrolled in MA, MA/PhD, and PhD programs with emphases in all the major literary periods and genres as well as special emphases in creative writing, folklore and oral tradition, critical theory, rhetoric and composition, language and linguistics, and African diaspora studies.

Students admitted to the graduate program usually receive a teaching assistantship. The admissions committee will nominate a small number of outstanding applicants to compete for a variety of University fellowships. Advanced students may have the opportunity to assist faculty in editing The Missouri Review, a nationally recognized journal of fiction, poetry, and essays; Oral Tradition, the only journal involved in the comparative study of oral traditions; Center, a journal of the literary arts; The Eighteenth-Century Novel; and the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. The English department is proud of the success of its graduate students, who have been recognized in various national forums and have published books, poems, stories, and articles in leading journals and presses.

The mission of the graduate program in English is to train students across this wide range of interest areas to become scholars and teachers. Our program is designed to give students ample teaching opportunities--both in freshman composition and in courses in literature and other specializations housed in the department. In most cases, our teaching assistants design their own courses. Most of our successful PhD candidates pursue teaching careers at two- and four-year colleges. Some of our MA degree recipients pursue further degrees, either at Mizzou or elsewhere, teach at two-year colleges or schools, or follow other careers inside or outside of academia. Please see the placement page of our web site for the employment of recent Mizzou PhDs.

Coursework is meant to provide a broad knowledge of literature in its theoretical and historical dimensions, and the array of special emphases allows students to pursue specific interests. Students may take up to six hours outside of our department in each degree program, and the small number of core required courses are designed to build connections among students and lay the theoretical groundwork for work across our discipline. Apart from coursework, the department requires either high proficiency in one foreign language or working knowledge of two foreign languages. Languages are required so that students have some access to literature and scholarship from outside their own tradition. MA students may opt to take a comprehensive examination or write a thesis; PhD students take written and oral comprehensive exams before undertaking the PhD dissertation, which is meant to be an original contribution to the field in which it is written. The MA comprehensive examination assesses mastery over the broad range of literature in history, allowing students to work with an examination committee on questions that respond to particular student interests as well as the breadth of literary history. The PhD examinations require a high level of mastery of both a "primary" and and "secondary" field--these fields, defined by students in cooperation with their examination advisers and their committees, are based in literary history or in genre.

Despite the rigor of our requirements, our completion rate has been well above the national average, as more than 90% of students in recent years have finished the degree programs in which they have been enrolled. We have a number of initiatives in place to ensure that students are integrated into the life of the department, from all-department colloquia on four or five Friday afternoons per semester--in which visiting speakers or home faculty present scholarship for reflection and debate--to more informal sessions outside of regular coursework. It is important for eventual success in the program--and in the field of literary studies as a whole--for students to take advantage of these opportunities whether or not a speaker directly addresses a topic or field of the student's particular interest. Candidates for faculty positions in the department present work in the early spring as part of the colloquium series, and the department encourages graduate students to participate in its search for these candidates, including placing a graduate student on each search committee and asking job candidates to meet with graduate students in their fields of interest. First-year students take a one-hour year-long Introduction to Graduate Studies, which is meant to help acclimate them to department culture and the field of graduate studies in English. Beginning the fall of 2005 we are putting in place a two-hour Job Placement Workshop, which will help prepare PhD candidates for the academic job market. We have a long-running Dissertation Workshop that helps students weather the very difficult process of writing the dissertation. The Creative Writing Program sponsors a student reading series. The English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) has representatives on all major departmental committees, and its officers work closely with English Department officers on matters related to graduate education.

Online applications are available through the ApplyYourself Application Network.

For more information, please consult the MU Graduate School's Prospective Student Information or contact

Andrew Hoberek, Director of Graduate Studies
phone: 573-882-8068
email: hobereka@missouri.edu