Program Overview

The Department

Welcome! We are very pleased that you are interested in learning more about our graduate program and perhaps applying for admission.

This site is designed to offer you a quick overview, which we hope is helpful in giving you some important information about us. Our graduate program is small, encouraging extensive interaction between faculty and students in a collaborative environment that is both rigorous and supportive. Our program is not designed to grant a terminal M.A. degree. Instead, we hope and expect that students will proceed beyond the M.A. degree to Ph.D. study; students with an M.A. in hand may enter directly into our doctoral program.

As a Research I university, we have a distinguished, award-winning faculty, many of whom teach in our graduate program, and we invite you to learn more about us. Please see our individual faculty profiles. Our collective expertise covers a wide range of historical periods, authors, literary and aesthetic movements, and critical discourses. Special interests of our faculty include black cultural studies; Marxist, feminist, and queer perspectives on literature and culture; postcolonial and multicultural studies; visual studies and poetics; various aspects of poststructuralist theory; and ecocriticism.

Graduate students have a great deal of choice in determining their course of study. Classes are small, with seminars varying in size from five to fifteen students. To get a sense of our recent offerings, please see the Current and Archive course information. Students may also take approved courses in other Tufts departments, as well as enroll in seminars in a consortium of schools that includes Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, and in the interdisciplinary Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at MIT.

Our Ph.D. students gain excellent experience as teachers, designing and offering their own courses in Tufts’ First-Year Writing Program. Because of their experience and the strong support we provide, our job placement record is extremely strong. Over the past five years, almost all of our Ph.D. recipients have secured academic positions, the majority of them tenure-track. Recent tenure-track appointments include jobs at Northeastern University, UMass Dartmouth, Sweet Briar College, Queens College, California State-Fresno, De Paul University, Bridgewater State University, Emmanuel College, Manhattan College, and South Trondelag University College, Norway. Our students have also been successful in winning prestigious fellowships, such as the Ann Plato Fellowship at Trinity College. For more information, see Job Placements.

All students entering with a B.A. are guaranteed 5 1/2 years of full funding (tuition plus stipend); students entering with an M.A. receive one year’s course credit and 4 ½ years of funding. There are also opportunities to obtain additional support through competitive fellowships. The university awards several Provost's Fellowships to incoming students, as well as a few Dean's Humanities Fellowships, designed to increase diversity in our field. Advanced students may apply to team-teach with a fulltime faculty member through the GIFT program or to receive a fellowship at our Humanities Center.

If you have any questions or would like to talk with a current graduate student, please feel free to get in touch with us at gradenglish@tufts.edu.

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