Literary and Cultural Studies

Program Description

The University of Missouri-Columbia English Department is home to a rich tradition of teaching and scholarship in British and American literature and culture. Thanks to the success of its enhancement proposals, the department has been able to build upon the tradition established by its distinguished emeriti and to expand its core offerings in a number of new and exciting areas. The dramatic growth rate of our graduate faculty is remarkable in what has been a difficult period for humanities programs across the country. Since 2000, the department has made nearly twenty new full-time, tenure-track appointments in literary and cultural studies alone, including ones in medieval literature, creative non-fiction, and rhetoric and composition/women’s and gender studies.

Within our department, several clusters of junior and senior faculty work together in the following theoretical areas: twentieth-century American literature and cultural theory; African diaspora studies; colonial and postcolonial literatures; film studies; visual culture; and literature, science, and medicine. Recently, one of our faculty, Elaine Lawless, was appointed director of the Center for Arts and Humanities. She has been working actively to encourage campus-wide collaborative projects. Under the Center’s direction, several collaborative research groups have already formed, including ones on “Visual Literacy in a Digital World,” “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Race, Class, Ethnicity,” “Gender and Culture,” and “Cultural Policy, Public Rhetoric, and Human Conservation within Arts and Humanities.”

We offer a thorough range in the traditional historical periods, each covered by a core group of primary faculty. The department has a long tradition of teaching and research in the historical periods and remains strongly devoted to literary history as a field. Much of our work in this area is united by our commitment to situating literature within cultural history, with individual faculty interests ranging from the politics of medieval marriage to colonial cartography, from Native intellectual history to women and aging.

This historical emphasis is one way in which the department seeks to cultivate new relationships among all areas of English studies. In addition to forming topical or theoretical nodes of inquiry where the interests of faculty coincide across periods, we strive to build bridges between literature and the four other areas represented in our department: folklore, rhetoric, linguistics, and creative writing. Attracting a mixed population of literature and creative writing students, many of our seminars are made particularly dynamic by the cross-fertilization of scholarly and creative agendas. This is equally true of literature courses taught by creative writing faculty. Similar interaction with faculty and fellow-students in rhetoric and composition, linguistics, and folklore broadens the range of literary study and helps students to form a cosmopolitan notion of the profession.

The department provides a congenial environment for graduate study that is both intellectually nurturing and professionally stimulating. Several unique opportunities are available for MA and PhD students. The most remarkable of these is the opportunity to team-teach with a faculty member in one’s area of specialization—with an equal division of labor, as opposed to the hierarchical arrangement characteristic of the "teaching assistant" model. Another opportunity is the newly implemented Collaborative Research Fellowship, which provides a graduate student financial support in the form of one course reduction so that he/she can collaborate with a faculty member on an article-length project. The more usual opportunities for Graduate Teaching Assistants to design and teach composition and surveys are also abundant. Other kinds of opportunities are detailed  on the Graduate Studies pages. Material conditions are similarly favorable. The stipend for PhD students is $12,380 for the first year and $13,040 per year thereafter. Additional support is available through numerous merit- and need-based fellowships. We are committed to meeting the financial need of students at all levels.

We foster career development in a variety of ways, ranging from ongoing individual mentoring to internship opportunities to travel funding. Our job placement advisor, for example, teaches a course in which students apply for fellowships; compose teaching statements and portfolios, CVs and cover letters; and revise writing samples in preparation for the academic job market.  Our Department Colloquia foster broad academic engagement throughout the academic year, alternating panel discussions on the state of graduate instruction and the future of the profession with a distinguished lecture series sponsored by the Center for Literary Arts. Recent distinguished lecturers include Shawn Michelle Smith and Stephen Greenblatt. Committed to graduate pedagogy that is responsive to the realities of the profession, we are dedicated to forging individual programs of study that can generate viable career strategies. Since the spring of 2000, we have placed our new PhDs in tenure-track positions in medieval, Early American, Victorian, American, African-American, Modern, Film Studies, and Post-Colonial literatures. This is in addition to tenure-track placements in folklore, creative writing, and other program areas. Numerous other graduates have secured visiting positions as well as research and administrative appointments.