Areas of Emphasis
The Ph.D. emphasis areas help students to conceptualize their research projects within larger rubrics that cross traditional areas of research. They attempt, in other words, to mirror and to model the innovative changes taking place in the discipline at large. The emphasis areas are intended to be flexible and suggestive, not prescriptive. They are reviewed and modified regularly by the faculty to reflect the faculty’s current and future strengths, and they place students at the forefront of methodological and theoretical change in the profession at large.
Because the emphasis areas are not prescriptive, students may also, with the approval of an advisor, create a specialized emphasis that bridges interdisciplinary areas of interest or that carves out areas of research not represented by existing emphases. Or, they may choose to define themselves within more traditional fields of study and shape a course of study that prepares them to engage in long-standing questions about a period, author, or genre.
African American Literature and Culture
African American literature and culture promotes critical investigation and analysis of literary and cultural representations produced by and about people of African descent in the United States, Africa, and the diaspora. Coursework in this area draws from a variety of methodological approaches—postcolonial, critical race theory, queer theory, cultural studies, historical materialism, sociolinguistics, African and African diaspora cinema, popular culture, and Black feminist theory—unified by their commitment to questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality.
Faculty working in African American literature and culture include Ken Harrow, Lynn Makau, Lloyd Pratt, Geneva Smitherman, Jennifer Williams, and Jeff Wray.
Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities
Feminisms, genders, sexualities foregrounds feminist approaches to the study of literature and culture. Inclusive of a range of methods, the emphasis stresses the inextricability of questions of gender and sexuality from those of race, social class, ethnicity, and nationality, not only as these relations are officially conceived, but also as they are lived in the everyday. Because feminist inquiry is an epistemological and political exigency that crosses intellectual and disciplinary endeavors, coursework for this emphasis covers a number of different areas, including critical race feminisms, transnational feminisms, women writers and/or writing by women, psychoanalysis, masculinity studies, queer theory, Gay and Lesbian studies, feminist theory, and the history of feminist criticism.
Faculty working in feminisms, genders, sexualities include Zarena Aslami, Ken Harrow, Kathy Jurado, Sandra Logan, Lynn Makau, Ellen McCallum, Ellen Pollak, Judith Roof, and Jennifer Williams.
Film and Visual Culture
Film and visual culture encourages students to think about film and visual culture in its relationship to modern cultural politics and within the history of representational technologies and perceptual regimes. Animated by cross-disciplinary theoretical work and covering a range of media—including cinema and pre-cinematic visual technologies, photography, painting, architecture, graphic and digital media, and literature—research in this field foregrounds questions pertaining to vision, embodiment, and modern subjectivity; theories of realism and mimesis; politics and mass media; the visualization of space, time, and movement in literature and the other arts; and literary forms as they construct, anticipate, or respond to the filmic registers of modern experience.
Faculty working in film and visual culture include Jennifer Fay, Ken Harrow, Scott Juengel, Ellen McCallum, Justus Nieland, Patrick O’Donnell, Stephen Rachman, Judith Roof, Karl Schoonover, Judith Stoddart, Bill Vincent, and Jeff Wray.
History and Theory of Narrative
History and theory of narrative encourages the comparative, cross-disciplinary study of the history, theory, and poetics of narrative, including the development of the novel and the evolution of cinema. This area engages psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, deconstructive, political, and postmodern critiques of narrative and representation. Students may choose to develop a period specialty or a focus in film, the novel, the epic, narrative poetry, or nonfiction narrative.
Faculty working in history and theory of narrative include Marcia Aldrich, Zarena Aslami, Jennifer Fay, Scott Juengel, Ellen McCallum, Ellen Pollak, Patrick O’Donnell, W.S. Penn, Judith Roof, and Sheila Teahan.
Literature of the Americas
Literature of the Americas (LOTA) is designed to spatially reconceptualize the study of “American” literature through comparative study of the colonial and postcolonial texts of Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The LOTA emphasis develops a transdisciplinary theoretical perspective, and students are encouraged to work across linguistic borders whenever possible.
Faculty members working in LOTA include Stephen Carl Arch, Salah Hassan, Kathy Jurado, Scott Michaelsen, Patrick O’Donnell, Lloyd Pratt, Stephen Rachman, and Edward Watts.
Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Medieval and early modern studies focuses on British and American literature and culture before 1800. This emphasis addresses period-specific tensions that are also germane to contemporary conditions; it invites theoretical and historical engagements with issues of genre and language, early mass culture, imperialism and slavery, social and sexual identities, and political transformations (both local and global). Students are encouraged to take courses across a very broad range of periods and geographic regions.
Faculty members working in medieval and early modern studies include Stephen Carl Arch, Stephen Deng, Scott Juengel, Sandra Logan, Lister Matheson, Ellen Pollak, Jyotsna Singh, and Tess Tavormina.
Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies
Postcolonial and diaspora studies is comparative, interdisciplinary, and internationalist, emphasizing theoretical approaches to the geopolitics of empire, colonial discourse, anticolonial resistance, race and nation, subaltern subjectivities, nonwestern and diaspora literatures, and globalization.
Faculty working in postcolonial and diaspora studies include Zarena Aslami, Ken Harrow, Salah Hassan, Sheng-mei Ma, Jyotsna Singh, and Edward Watts.
Transatlantic Modernities
Transatlantic modernities encourages students to think broadly about the formation of modern literature and culture since the eighteenth century. Students may develop a specific theoretical, period, or national specialty within the emphasis (e.g., cultural theory, nineteenth-century studies, modern American or British literature). Courses in the emphasis area situate such specialties within larger historical and theoretical contexts, highlighting such problems as the history of the aesthetic, the history of the novel, visual studies, and the rise of nationalism.
Faculty working in transatlantic modernities include Stephen Carl Arch, A.C. Goodson, William Johnsen, Scott Juengel, Sheng-mei Ma, Ellen McCallum, Justus Nieland, Stephen Rachman, Robin Silbergleid, Judith Stoddart, and Sheila Teahan.
