Graduate Studies

Graduate Studies in English at UB

Graduate Professor David Schmid, Director
302 Clemens Hall

Phone: 716-645-2575
x1008 (graduate office)
x1010 (admissions)

The doctoral and master's programs of the University at Buffalo, Department of English, are among the most open, flexible, and innovative in the country. They are programs marked by variety and freedom, in which there are virtually no mandated courses, no large lectures, and no required languages. Students are not required to take seminars in any particular order and may pick and choose from a wide range of offerings in American and British literature, film, psychoanalytic psychology, philosophy, folklore, myth, poetry, poetics, and critical theory.

Ours is also a program in which students are active in every phase of the department's operations. A unique system of political parity gives graduate students a powerful voice in departmental operations. Department meetings are open to graduate students, and student representatives sit as voting members in those meetings and in all departmental committees, including the Graduate Review Committee and the Committee on Admissions and Fellowships. The English Graduate Student Association is an active and vital group that elects students to committees, helps form the graduate curriculum, and sponsors lectures, conferences, films, and, of course, parties.

The Intellectual Environment
Because we are a large program, we are able to offer a wide range of traditional and innovative courses--between twenty and twenty-two each semester--from period surveys to seminars in theory and methodology. We value this variety as essential to a course of literary study that is both responsible to change and responsible to tradition. We neither deride the canon nor glorify it; we merely try to create the conditions in which the student defines an individual relation to it.

In our program, students are active in every phase of operation. A system of political parity gives graduate students a strong voice in departmental affairs. Department meetings are open to graduate students, and student representatives sit as voting members in those meetings and on all departmental committees, including the Graduate Review Committee, which oversees the operations of the graduate program, the department's Admissions and fellowships Committee, and departmental hiring committees. The English Graduate Student Association is an active group that elects students to committees; helps shape the graduate program; and sponsors conferences, lectures, films, and study groups. We also strive to keep the boundaries of English as open and as permeable as possible, having faculty from other departments and programs--Modern Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, Media Study, Center for the Americas, Women's Studies--teach graduate seminars in ours, and regularly cross-listing courses from other departments and programs. English and Comparative Literature normally cross-list courses, so that students can satisfy English department seminar requirements by taking comparative literature seminars, for example, Shaun Irlaum's "South Africa and PostColonial Theory" or Rodolphe Gasche's "Theories-Interpretation." More important than any particular thing we do, however, is the day-to-day intellectual environment. There is an extraordinary amount of good conversation that goes on, both formally and informally, among and between faulty and students, who thrive on sharing with each other the work they do. Students will find that seminars are places in which faculty teach what they are working on and students are encouraged to learn by exploring and challenging.

Important links:

Student Response Center
My UB

Requirements:

M.A.

Ph.D.