Graduate Studies In English

General Information

Thank you for your interest in our program. If you are a prospective graduate student, we hope that these materials will provide you with the information you need to decide whether to complete an application to Illinois.

The graduate program in English at Illinois, ranked the 18th best in the country in the 2004-05 U.S. News and World Report survey, has provided comprehensive education in English studies for nearly 75 years. We support course work and research in all areas of English and American literature from the medieval to the postmodern, as well as in writing studies, film studies, cultural studies, literary theory, African-American studies, gender and women's studies, and creative writing. Our outstanding faculty includes winners of Mellon, Guggenheim, Yale Younger Poet, National Endowment for the Humanities, and MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards, and has long been especially strong in Renaissance and modern British literatures and in all periods and pockets of American literature. Intensive hiring of young professors over the past decade (ten arrived in the fall of 2004 alone) has expanded our offerings in critical race theory, transatlantic modernisms, postcolonial culture, Asian-American and Latino/a studies, performance theory, the history of the book, visual culture, Jewish studies, Irish studies, science studies, queer theory, creative non-fiction, and fiction writing. We positively encourage, rather than tolerate, interdisciplinary study. The majority of our faculty holds joint appointments with or teaches seminars cross-listed with interdisciplinary units. Our graduate students may thus receive formal certifications in Medieval Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, Cinema Studies, and African-American Studies, and through the internationally known Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, sponsor of field-shaping anthologies such as Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Illinois UP, 1988), Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1992), and the forthcoming Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke UP, 2004). Degree candidates in English may participate in these units' colloquium series and apply for their travel grants. Both students and faculty benefit from the superb University of Illinois Library, a collection of 21 million items that comprises the world's largest public university archive. Its Rare Book and Special Collections division contains more than 200,000 volumes and is noted for its unique holdings in Shakespeare, Milton, eighteenth-century literature, nineteenth-century periodicals, H. G. Wells, Carl Sandburg, W. S. Merwin, and Spanish Civil War documents. Amid all this bigness, English graduate classes remain small, enrolling no more than 14 students, with significantly fewer in the creative writing workshops and in many specialized seminars in literary criticism.

At Illinois, thorough preparation for college teaching accompanies intense training in scholarship or imaginative writing. Many students teach independent English classes from the time they enter the program. They are aided by a weeklong teaching orientation, by frequent seminars on teaching techniques, and by formal mentoring from advanced graduate students. Students lead not only composition and business and technical writing sections, but also introductory literature, creative writing, and film classes of all genres and periods, including “special topics” courses closely linked to their dissertation research. As a result, they routinely win campus-wide teaching awards and complete the graduate program with unusually robust pedagogical skills and credentials. Students also have the opportunity, as they move through the program, to work as graders, teaching assistants, and undergraduate advisors; to obtain research and administrative assistantships; to tutor in the Writers' Workshop; and to intern at the University of Illinois Press. American Literary History, The Eighteenth Century, and Ninth Letter, prominent journals newly headquartered in the English department, offer editorial jobs and experience to an increasing number of degree-seekers. Dissertation writers are assured of at least one paid semester free from teaching and other academic employment. Altogether, we guarantee an exceptionally long term of full financial support to all students in good standing: seven years for students entering with the B.A. or B.S. degree, six years for students entering with an M.A., and three years for M.F.A. students.

Our graduate student body arrives from undergraduate and Masters programs across the entire United States, and several students from Europe, Asia, and/or Africa join the program each year. Nearly all students enter with some fellowship aid (e.g., Pew, Mellon, Javitts, or various English department grants), and a number have been awarded generous three-year University of Illinois Fellowships. The graduate community is intellectually supportive, sociologically diverse, and purposefully non-cutthroat. Fifteen percent of the 154 students currently in residence are African American, Native American, Asian American, Latino/a, and international students; we are committed to increasing this percentage with the help of departmental and university-wide minority fellowships. Students sit on many departmental committees, and an active English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) organizes student-faculty social events and presentations on professional development. Students also participate in poetry and fiction readings, in dissertation writing circles, and in specialized study groups, some of these funded through the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH), the lively humanities center on campus that endows competitive fellowships for advanced graduate students. The English department itself hosts a wide and sometimes dizzying array of lectures, workshops, and conferences.

Life in Urbana-Champaign/Champaign-Urbana, a “twin city” of 105,000, is easy and relatively inexpensive and has some of the cultural advantages of a larger urban center. The four theaters of the university's Krannert Center for the Performing Arts present over three hundred performances annually by high-profile music, drama, opera, and dance groups. (In 2004-05, for example, Krannert Center patrons will be able to hear everyone from Emmylou Harris to the Julliard String Quartet, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to Ravi Shankar, the Kodo Drums to Nancy Wilson and Ramsey Lewis.) The non-university terrain of Champaign-Urbana (“Chambana,” to its natives) feeds an accessible music and arts scene of its own, currently centered around the proliferating bars, clubs, lofts, cafés, and restaurants of downtown Champaign . Students seeking a stronger dose of metropolitan life can enjoy the bright lights of Chicago after a two-hour trip by car, bus, or Amtrak train. Longer journeys can be launched from Champaign-Urbana's Willard Airport, where American, Delta, and Northwest run daily service to major airline hubs in Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis.

Our program is designed to provide students with the training in research and teaching that they need to obtain academic jobs. Prospective applicants should remember, however, that college and university faculty positions in English are limited. We consistently place more than half of our literature and film Ph.D.s in tenure-track jobs--a success rate that is higher than the national average. We are especially pleased to report that every one of our recent writing studies Ph.D.s has secured a tenure-track position; since 2002, in fact, about 80% of our job seekers in all fields have received one. Despite these encouraging statistics, it is nevertheless the case that the academic job market remains depressed, and there is little indication that freezes in public university funding will allow it to improve in the near future. Due in part to the limited number of tenure-track jobs, about a third of the students who enter our M.A. program decide not to complete the Ph.D. degree. Most students who leave with the M.A. find that it provides them with strong leverage in other areas of work or study; in recent years these areas have included law school, library school, technical writing, academic administration, secondary and primary education, computing, entrepreneurship, and union organizing. A recent national study by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation has discovered that, ten years after winning their Ph.D.s in English, almost all degree-holders with non-academic jobs were glad that they had attended graduate school, convinced that it had equipped them with skills vital to their current careers.

We work to counter rocky market conditions by offering sustained and vigorous support for our students on the academic job market. Two faculty placement officers conduct letter-writing workshops and multiple mock interviews for job-seekers, making our placement service a model across campus and nationwide. We also generally extend several years of full-time employment to students who have completed the Ph.D.; this can give new doctorates the extra time and credentials they need to secure an assistant professorship. In the past decade, our Ph.D. students have accepted tenure-track jobs at such schools as the University of Alabama, Arizona State University, Augustana College, Ball State University, California State University at Fullerton, University of California at Northridge, University of California at Santa Barbara, Colorado State University, DePaul University, Eastern Washington University, University of Finland, University of Florida, Florida Atlantic University, Florida State University, University of Houston, University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois State University, University of Iowa, Kalamazoo College, Lincoln University, Louisiana State University, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota at Moorhead, University of Montana, City University of New York, State University of New York at Cortland, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Northwestern University, Parkland College, Penn State University, Purdue University, Rochester Community College, Rutgers University, University of San Francisco, Smith College, Southern Florida University, Spelman College, Springfield College, University of Tennessee, University of Texas at Arlington, Vanderbilt University, Westfield State College, Willamette University, William Paterson University, the College of Wooster, and Yale University.

A wealth of further information about the Illinois English department and links to affiliated programs appear on the departmental web site (www.english.uiuc.edu). If you have questions about the graduate program in particular, please feel free to call or e-mail me or the staff of the graduate studies office at (217) 333-3646 or at engl_resources@ad.uiuc.edu.

Stephanie Foote
Director of English Graduate Studies
Associate Professor of English, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory