Message from the Director of Graduate Studies

September 2009

Professor Frank Palmeri
Director of Graduate Studies

Greetings. I am pleased to be able to let you know about recent developments in our program of which we are proud—especially our new faculty, our students’ accomplishments, and the level of support we can offer.

We now have areas of strength in Caribbean Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Culture, Transatlantic and Ethnic Studies (including Irish Studies), and Gender and Sexuality. Recent publications by our faculty include Patricia Saunders’ Alien-Nation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Lexington), Tim Watson’s Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780-1870 (Cambridge), David Luis-Brown’s Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Duke), the four-volume collection Women’s Political Writings 1610-1715 (Pickering and Chatto), co-edited by Mihoko Suzuki, and The Jewish Graphic Novel (Rutgers), co-edited by Ranen Omer-Sherman.

We have recently been joined by Joel Nickels, who works on American modernism and twentieth-century poetry; John Funchion, whose area is nineteenth-century American literature and culture; and Marlene Daut, in early American and early Caribbean, both Anglophone and Francophone. These young faculty substantially strengthen our offerings in American literature, so that we offer the full range of British and American literature from late medieval and early modern through contemporary literature.

We are now admitting exclusively to the PhD, and have had notable success in placing our graduates. In the last two years, our PhDs accepted tenure-track positions at the University of Missouri, Columbia, the Citadel, the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, the University of Indiana, South Bend, and Mount Mercy College. Graduates from the department now hold tenured or tenure-track positions at Depauw, Colgate, Kent State University, and the University of Alaska. In addition, our recent PhDs have had books published by Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Fairleigh Dickinson, and the University of Delaware Press.

We offer a stipend of $20,000 per year to all incoming PhD students as part of their Teaching Assistantship, placing us in the top 10% of English programs in the country. Also available are competitive three-year University Fellowships, year-long dissertation fellowships, and summer fellowships for those who have passed their comprehensive exams ($5000), as well as support for travel to present papers at conferences and to conduct archival research for the dissertation. The Center for the Humanities awards dissertation fellowships on a competitive basis.

The active English Graduate Organization holds a graduate conference every year, and the department has hosted numerous conferences on James Joyce and on Caribbean Studies; last winter we co-hosted a conference on Samson Agonistes and religious violence in commemoration of the Milton quadricentennial. Students also have an opportunity to work on Anthurium, the on-line Caribbean Literary Studies journal, or the James Joyce Literary Supplement. After taking a practicum on the teaching of literature, all of our students teach at least one literature class before they defend their dissertations.

I hope that if you have a serious interest in literary and cultural studies, have taken the equivalent of an undergraduate major in literature, and would like a course of study that offers a wide range of traditional fields with work in newer methodologies and areas, you will pursue your interest in our program. Please contact us at the email address below.

Frank Palmeri
Professor of English
Director of Graduate Studies
englishgrad@miami.edu