Best Accredited Universities for Doctoral Phd program in English Language and Literature

The Graduate Program in English aims to provide PhD candidates with a broad knowledge of the field of English, including critical and cultural theory. Additional important skills include facility with the tools of scholarship—ancient and modern foreign languages, bibliographic procedures, and textual and editorial methods. The program also emphasizes the ability to write well, to do solid and innovative scholarly and critical work in a specialized field or fields, to teach effectively, and to make articulate presentations at conferences, seminars, and symposia.

The Yale English Department offers a broad-ranging program of graduate education, with courses that engage all periods of British literature, American literature since its inception, and many of the contemporary interdisciplines (feminism, media studies, post-colonialism, Black studies, LGBTQIA+ studies, and the environmental humanities).

The Stanford English department has a long tradition of training the next generation of scholars to become leaders in academia and related fields. This Ph.D. program encourages the production of ambitious, groundbreaking dissertation work across the diverse field interests of our prestigious faculty. The English Department seeks to teach and promote an understanding of both the significance and the history of British and American literature (broadly defined) and to foster an appreciation of the richness and variety of texts in the language. It offers rigorous training in interpretive thinking and precise expression.

The English doctoral programme is competitive and limited. Every year, normally accept 8–10 new students. The PhD program is vibrant and rigorous within a collegial environment of intellectual interaction, and they are well known for their unique and influential approaches to the study of literature. The Black Atlantic, Irish and other diasporas, multilingual North America, and pan-Pacific literatures are among the many English and American literary genres that students are urged to read widely.

At Johns Hopkins, the PhD in English literature takes three years to complete after two years of dissertation research and writing. The same amount of financial assistance will be provided to students for the whole five-year period who maintain good standing.

The English doctoral programme is competitive and limited. Every year, normally accept 8–10 new students. The PhD program is vibrant and rigorous within a collegial environment of intellectual interaction, and they are well known for their unique and influential approaches to the study of literature. The Black Atlantic, Irish and other diasporas, multilingual North America, and pan-Pacific literatures are among the many English and American literary genres that students are urged to read widely.

The graduate program in English is a highly selective program in which students specialize in historical areas but also pursue interdisciplinary perspectives, with particular interest in critical theory, literature and science, literature and politics, postcolonial and ethnic studies, and gender studies. A nearly 1:1 faculty to graduate student ratio ensures that students receive considerable individual attention as they progress in their course of studies.

The English graduate program at Brown provides specialised instruction in literary theory, criticism, literary research, and the teaching of writing and literature. A variety of theoretical stances are represented among the faculty in the English department. Literary history, novel theory, poetic form, literature and visual arts, African American and Asian American literature, critical race theory, postmodernism, new historicism, feminist theory and criticism, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial literature, and film studies are just a few of the topics in which faculty regularly publish books and articles.

Rice English integrates creative and critical practice through training in close reading, analytical writing, cultural history and theory, and craft/form. The department faculty research and pedagogy cover the breadth of the study of British and American literatures and cultures ranging from the medieval era to the present. The curriculum emphasizes literature and literary history, race and ethnicity studies, feminist and gender studies, queer theory and the history of sexuality, visual culture and comparative media studies, and the Anglophone literature of the postcolonial world. Faculty have particular strengths in the newer interdisciplinary areas of medical humanities, ecocriticism, post-humanism, and environmental humanities. Rice English is also home to a vibrant creative writing concentration offering a range of courses in fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction.

The Berkeley English Department offers a wide-ranging Ph.D. program, engaging in all historical periods of British and American literature, Anglophone literature, and critical and cultural theory. The program aims to assure that students gain a broad knowledge of literature in English as well as the highly-developed skills in scholarship and criticism necessary to do solid and innovative work in their chosen specialized fields.