Message from the Director of Graduate Studies

August 2011

Welcome to the Web pages of the English Department’s PhD Program. Our program is a select, dynamic one. Our small size allows us to give our doctoral students instruction and professional mentoring tailored to their individual needs and interests, and our location on the beautiful Coral Gables campus gives us easy access to the diverse, vibrant, and unique cultural and intellectual offerings of the greater Miami area of South Florida.

Our program offers strong student support. We offer a generous stipend of $20,000 per year to each PhD student as part of the Teaching Assistantship, placing us in the top 10% of English programs in the nation. Also available are competitive two-year Provost’s Fellowships, year-long dissertation fellowships, and summer fellowships for those who have passed their comprehensive exams, as well as support for travel to present papers at conferences and to conduct archival research for the dissertation. In addition, the University of Miami’s Center for the Humanities awards semester-long dissertation fellowships on a competitive basis. In recent years, our PhDs have accepted tenure-earning positions at institutions such as the University of Missouri-Columbia, the Citadel, the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, the University of Indiana-South Bend, and Allegheny College. Graduates of the program hold tenured or tenure-earning positions at Depauw, Colgate, Kent State, and the University of Alaska. Recent PhDs have published books with Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Fairleigh Dickinson, and the University of Delaware Press. 

Our active, accomplished faculty teach graduate courses in an extensive range of American, British, and other world literatures in English (especially Caribbean and African), from late medieval and early modern through contemporary, and we offer introductory and advanced, specialized seminars in theory. As a department, we have particular expertise in Transatlantic and Ethnic (including Irish), Renaissance and Early Modern, Gender and Sexuality, and Caribbean Studies. We are delighted to welcome a new faculty member, Renée Fox, whose research focuses on Irish Studies and nineteenth-century British literature and who is writing a book entitled, Necromantic Victorians: History, Reanimation, and the Politics of Literary Innovation, 1868-1903. This year, we are pleased to be seeking a senior scholar in Caribbean literature.

Our literature faculty—who have collectively authored, edited, or translated over 50 books—have in recent years won prestigious grants and fellowships from national institutions such as Fulbright, the Mellon Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. Recent faculty publications include Patricia Saunders’ Alien-Nation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Lexington); Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Ian Randle), co-edited by Saunders; Tim Watson’s Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780-1870 (Cambridge); Hamel, the Obeah-Man by Cynric R. Williams (Broadview), co-edited by Watson; The Jewish Graphic Novel (Rutgers), co-edited by Ranen Omer-Sherman; Robert Casillo and John Paul Russo’s The Italian in Modernity (Toronto); Italian Passages: Making and Thinking History, co-edited by Russo; the four-volume collection Women’s Political Writings 1610-1715 (Pickering and Chatto) co-edited by Mihoko Suzuki; The History of British Women’s Writing, 1610-1690 (Palgrave), edited by Suzuki; and my own Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse (Ashgate). We are looking forward to the publication of Joel Nickels’ The Art of the Possible: Modernism and the Politics of Spontaneity and Brenna Munro’s Queer Constitutions: Sexuality, Literature, and Freedom in South Africa, both of which are forthcoming from Minnesota. Many of our faculty serve on national editorial and advisory boards, and closer to home, we actively foster the ideals of intellectual interdisciplinarity and community within the College of Arts and Sciences by teaching for or directing such programs as American Studies, Africana Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Judaic Studies.

The University of Miami is home to a thriving, diverse intellectual and artistic community, and every academic year brings with it a series of compelling events in the arts, humanities, and related disciplines that are especially enriching for our graduate students. Last year, for example, the Center for the Humanities hosted an interdisciplinary conference on anthropology and the humanities entitled, “Imagining Culture(s), Rethinking Disciplines,” and Dipesh Chakrabarty was the keynote speaker. The Center also held a symposium on “The Present Future of Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies,” for which George Lamming delivered the keynote address. This fall, playwright Nilo Cruz will give a lecture on the topic, “Theatre Accompanied by Light: Searching for Poetry in the Theatre,” and the Center will host a major interdisciplinary conference, “Florida at the Crossroads: Five Hundred Years of Encounters, Conflicts, and Exchanges.” We can also look forward to William Sherman’s spring lecture, “Knowledge Isn’t Power: Renaissance Intelligence and its Modern Legacies,” in addition to many, many other engaging talks, workshops, and events throughout the year.

The English Graduate Organization holds a graduate symposium every year. Students also have opportunities to work on Anthurium, the on-line Caribbean Literary Studies journal; the James Joyce Literary Supplement; and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. We have an active dissertation discussion group, and at least once a year, we hold a panel for the presentation of dissertation prospectuses that have been approved. Advanced graduate students are invited to participate, alongside faculty, in interdisciplinary research groups in Transatlantic, Early Modern, Hemispheric, Queer, and Animal Studies. After taking a practicum on the teaching of literature, all of our students teach at least one literature class before they defend their dissertations.

If you are interested in advanced literary and cultural studies, have taken the equivalent of an undergraduate major in literature, and would like to pursue a course of study that combines traditional fields of inquiry with work in newer methodologies and areas, we most cordially welcome your application to our program. Please feel free to contact us at the email address below.

Pamela Hammons
Professor of English
Director of Graduate Studies
englishgrad@miami.edu