UW-Madison’s English Department is consistently ranked as one of the best in the country, offering an experience that is both rigorous and supportive. The department houses four distinct tracks: Literary Studies, Composition & Rhetoric, English Language and Linguistics, and Creative Writing.
Graduate students pursuing an English PhD in Literary Studies, Composition & Rhetoric, or English Language and Linguistics are required to complete a PhD minor, with many students pursuing minors in Gender and Women’s Studies, African American Studies, History, and more. This requirement emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary research and study and encourages students to be ambitious in how they interweave their various research interests in what will become the basis for their preliminary exams and dissertation projects.
Long regarded as one of the top programs in the nation, Literary Studies consists of award-winning faculties and students working in a wide range of fields across periods, methods, and disciplines. The rigorous coursework and mentorship allow students to expand their breadth of knowledge, develop their expertise in their areas of specialization, and learn how to produce innovative and original works in the early stages of their careers. The program also offers many teaching and professionalizing opportunities for students to become better educators. In addition to the PhD minor, students in the Literary Studies track may take an additional nine credits (three courses) of coursework from outside English graduate courses, which allows more flexibility for interdisciplinary studies.
Composition & Rhetoric offers a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of rhetoric, writing, and literacy that invites innovation and exploration to consider how language and communication have shaped our human experience. In a close-knit community, faculty and graduate students have engaged in research in the histories and theories of rhetoric (including Latin American rhetorics, race and rhetoric, Jewish rhetorics, Asian/American rhetorics, visual rhetorics, environmental rhetorics), Literacy Studies (including literacy and migration, literacy and identify, community literacies), community-engaged scholarship (including adult-learners, disability rhetorics, online communities), and writing studies (including writing program administration, writing center studies, and multilingual writing and linguistic justice). The program offers students extraordinary mentorships from world-renowned faculty, numerous opportunities for teaching, professionalization, and leadership development, and a vibrant and diverse graduate student community.
English Language and Linguistics (ELL) faculty contribute to the understanding of the structure, development, use, processing, and acquisition of the English language. By focusing on the syntax and phonology of English along with dialectal variation the members in ELL have active research areas in bilingualism and heritage language, second and third language acquisition, variation and register analysis in texts, and local and global dialects of English. The faculty in ELL have strong connections with other groups of linguists on campus in the Language Sciences program and also the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) program. Due to these broad campus connections, the groups of students who work with ELL faculty are a diverse mix of ELL PhD students, Linguistics PhD students, SLA programs, along with students from Psychology, Communication Sciences & Disorders, Curriculum & Instruction, and various language departments. The ELL program offers a PhD minor in English Language and Linguistics which is available to Literary Studies and Composition & Rhetoric PhD students as their PhD Minor option.
Creative Writing offers a top-ranked two-year MFA program in poetry and fiction. The program’s 2-to-1 student/teacher ratio allows students to receive extensive and generous mentorship from world-renowned faculty. In addition to full tuition remission, health insurance, and a competitive stipend, all students have the opportunity to teach courses in creative writing and composition, with rigorous pedagogical support. The program supports and encourages cross-genre work, and students can take workshops outside their main genre in addition to courses in creative nonfiction, comics, and playwriting. MFA students exemplify the Wisconsin Idea by hosting local readings and other literary events, teaching community writing classes in Madison through A Room of One’s Own Bookstore, Arts + Literature Laboratory, and Monsters of Poetry, and engaging in community outreach through the Oakhill Prison Humanities Project. The program also hosts the internationally competitive Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowships to support post-graduate writers working on books of poetry or fiction.
The English department’s longstanding commitment to cutting-edge interdisciplinary research is further highlighted by its large-scale faculty hiring initiatives in fields like Global Black Studies, Ecocriticism, and the Environmental Humanities, in addition to traditional areas of study like Medieval Studies and Romanticism. The diversity in research focus across faculty helps to ensure that students have the support they need to explore research questions and topics that are of the upmost interest to them both in their individual work and also through collaborative research workshops and student-led departmental colloquia, including the Americanist Reading Group and Lecture Series, Contemporary Theory Reading Group, Middle Modernity Group, Medieval Colloquium, Postcolonial Literary Forum, and more! Moreover, on a university scale, initiatives like the Center for Culture, History, and the Environment and the Center for Early Modern Studies, with each having both faculty and graduate student affiliates, reiterate the opportunity for transdisciplinary research and study.