The Department of English of Emory University offers its graduate students an environment that is both intellectually rigorous and collegial, a place where graduate students have the chance to learn from faculty conducting cutting-edge research and to receive mentoring as they become researchers and teachers in their own right.
A key to Emory’s graduate program is its size: With seven to nine students entering a year, the program is large enough to support a full range of interests in literary and cultural studies, but small enough that students enjoy ample access to faculty and to courses. As a result, students are able to craft programs of study that reflect their own individual interests, even when those interests cross disciplinary lines.
In fact, the small graduate programs in English and related departments make it possible to take classes and work with faculty from multiple departments. Our graduate students frequently enroll in courses in other departmants, several of which have certificate programs, such as Comparative Literature, the Institute for the Liberal Arts (which includes American Studies), and Women’s Studies. Our graduate students are also active in the Psychoanalytic Institute.
The result is a graduate program that instructs students in the traditions of literary studies and simultaneously encourages interdisciplinary research. While the department supports students in all fields of literary and cultural studies, from the Medieval to the contemporary, we have particular strengths in the Renaissance, African-American literature, the nineteenth-century literature of the United States, and twentieth-century poetry -- British, American, and especially Irish. Graduate students can draw on extensive archival collections in Woodruff Library in the fields of Irish and African American literature, as well as the renowned Danowski Collection of twentieth-century poetry.
Download a brochure on the Department of English.
Download a brochure on African American literary studies at Emory.
