Graduate Program Overview

Particular strengths of the department include Renaissance/Early Modern Studies, Twentieth-Century American literature, Postcolonial Literatures, African-American literature, Gender Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, and Creative Writing. In recent years, we have supplemented our course offerings in traditional fields with courses in Irish studies, postcolonial theory, African and Caribbean literatures, Latino literature, cultural rhetorics, jazz studies, American Indian literature, and cultural studies.

KU's newly established MFA program offers students tracks in fiction writing, poetry writing, playwriting, and creative nonfiction. The full-time creative writing faculty of seven has been widely published and anthologized and has been awarded such distinctions as the Gertrude Stein Award, the Kenyon Review Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize, the Kennedy Center Gold Medallion, and the Pushcart Prize. Students who finish their course work in two years may have the third year devoted almost entirely to the writing of the thesis. Internships are available with Cottonwood, KU's nationally recognized literary review, as well as the department's award-winning English Alternative Theater, and students with assistantships have the opportunity to teach a course in creative writing. In recent years, writers Salman Rushdie, Rita Dove, Cristina Garcia, Kent Haruf, Ted Kooser, Sherman Alexie, Cherrie Moraga, Nuruddin Farah, Diane Williams, Paul Muldoon and many others have come to the campus to give seminars and readings.

Our faculty boasts an outstanding publication record, having produced 17 single-authored books in the past five years alone. The department combines this scholarly success with a deep concern for teaching and mentoring. Our faculty have won numerous university-wide and national teaching awards (thirteen in ten years), and the department as a whole was given an award for outstanding teaching by the University's Center for Teaching Excellence in 2003.

Because we help our PhD students to develop into well-rounded academics, our rate of placement in tenure-track positions has been impressive, particularly given the downturn in the academic job market. More than 80% of our Ph.D.s who do national searches find tenure-track jobs. Our recent success may also have been helped by the department's support for job seekers. Eight years ago we created the position of Job Placement Advisor; the Advisor is a faculty member in charge of running workshops and mock interviews for graduate students, as well as providing one-on-one advising for those students preparing for the job market. In the past few years, our graduate students have accepted tenure-track jobs at institutions such as University of Washington, University of New Mexico, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, Eastern Illinois University, Xavier University, Valparaiso University, Baldwin-Wallace College, Ithaca College, and Lafayette College.

Our department has a strong tradition of democratic inclusion and sense of community. Faculty and graduate students participate as equals in various reading groups, community organizations, events involving visiting speakers, and our theater group, English Alternative Theatre (EAT). Perhaps more importantly, graduate students have a strong voice in the administration of the department; for example, they are on almost all departmental committees, including hiring committees.

Diversity

Our focus on inclusion and community also manifests itself in our attention to diversity. The department has been recognized by the university's Black Faculty and Staff Council for its "outstanding leadership in creating a multicultural academic environment," and 10% of our students come from traditionally underrepresented groups or are international. Not only are we interested in promoting diversity in faculty and student population, but we are also committed to promoting diversity and multiculturalism as important objects of intellectual inquiry both in our own classrooms and across the university and larger communities. The Ad-Hoc African/Americanist (AHAA) faculty group, for instance, fosters vigorous conversations about African, African-American, and African diaspora literatures among faculty and students, promotes diversity, and makes connections between the English Department and other units within the University of Kansas and the larger community for the sponsoring of multicultural events. Faculty and graduate students in our department have served as leaders and participants in the Hall Center's ongoing Gender Seminar. Faculty regularly crosslist courses with Women's Studies, African Studies, and the Center for Indigenous Nations. Both faculty and graduate students have spearheaded significant service-learning programs with the local community, including the Douglas County Jail.

Graduate Student Organization

Finally, our student organization, SAGE, fosters a sense of community among graduate students. SAGE stimulates and coordinates student activity in such areas as curriculum, academic standards and ethics, graduate teaching assistantships, professionalization, and orientation of new graduate students. SAGE also sponsors a colloquium and readings each semester, and publishes a graduate student newsletter.

Summer Institutes

The English Department hosts two intensive summer institutes which bring in nationally-known scholars for a two-week graduate seminar in a topic of interest in current scholarship: the Holmes Institute sponsors a visiting scholar in either American or British literature and the Institute for Rethinking Literature sponsors scholars using innovative, cutting-edge approaches to literary study. The Science Fiction Institute held on campus each summer is nationally recognized and offers graduate students opportunities to help in the programming process.

The university is set on top of Mount Oread and offers beautiful vistas of the surrounding area, while at the heart of the campus itself is Jayhawk Boulevard with its historic stone architecture. The appeal of KU does not end with the campus, however; we have a charming downtown with diverse restaurants and shops, many of which are independent and locally owned. Lawrence's music scene is considered among the best in the Midwest. Additionally, Kansas City, which boasts a wide variety of cultural venues, is only 30 miles away.

Both the department and the university offer numerous intellectual and cultural activities. The department itself sponsors a number of visiting speakers each year. Among recent luminaries have been Fredric Jameson, Salman Rushdie, Rita Dove, Cristina Garcia, Marjorie Garber, and Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. The department also has its own theater company, EAT, run by Professor Paul Lim, which has mounted over 50 full productions and 100 staged readings of plays. Of the playwrights who have been showcased thus far, over half have been KU students. The Hall Center for the Humanities aims to bring together faculty and graduate students with common interests from various disciplines to enable them to build on each others' ideas, and to share their knowledge within the university and with the wider community. Last, but by no means least, the university has an outstanding performing arts center, the Lied Center, which presents high-quality performances by established and emerging professional, national and international performing artists for the people of Kansas and the region.