Graduate Education

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 Department aims to train future scholars, writers, and teachers of many kinds: our primary focus is on the development of college and university professors, but our alumni also go on to careers as curators, librarians, secondary school teachers, university administrators, journalists, editors, and professional writers. Our faculty believe in the values of pluralism (in what is studied and how it is studied), and they are committed to preparing students to succeed in competitive and demanding professions. To that end, we make the teaching of undergraduates an important part of graduate training, as well as offering a wide array of professional development opportunities at The Yale Review, university libraries and museums, the Digital Humanities Lab, and elsewhere on campus.

Pluralism within the Department is enhanced by relations with other graduate programs. The English Department offers combined PhD programs with African-American Studies, Film and Media Studies, History of Art, Early Modern Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and has strong affiliations with graduate programs in American Studies, Comparative Literature, Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, and other humanistic disciplines. Faculty members are often joint appointees in English and another of these programs, and many courses are cross-listed. The Department encourages its students to design programs of study that combine specialization with wise generalization.