Request Information
Open your mind — and open your world — as you learn to read critically and develop persuasive arguments in a global context.
Clark’s master’s in English program imparts disciplinary practices for studying literature, reading closely, and integrating secondary scholarship. Equipped with this foundation of skills, you’ll gain insights into the narratives that shape our culture and society. The program promotes a broad view of literary studies within American and international contexts, and lets individual students narrow their specific focus through a thesis project on a topic of their choice.
Master’s candidate Jacqueline Schnieber’s thesis examines Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories through a new lens. She considers the significance of the inclusion of non-white characters in these celebrated short stories.
Good literature will challenge you to expand your horizon or look at something from a different perspective.
The Essentials
Our curriculum includes a required introduction to literary studies, as well as elective special-topics seminars in a range of geographical contexts and time periods. Working closely with your adviser, you will identify an area of focus for your thesis research and complete a project that builds on your unique scholarly interests.
Most students earn their degree in three or four semesters. Students must be in residence for at least one year (two years are required for recipients of a T.A. award). In addition, students must:
Requirements
3 to 4 semesters over 1.5 to 2 years
8 course units
Relevant. Challenging. Transformative.
Michael Bamburg
Professor
Professor Bamburg approaches the study of identity micro-analytically, as an emergent process that is deeply embedded in local and situated context.
Meredith Neuman
Associate Professor
Professor Neuman investigates how sermon auditors helped shape the dominant genre of Puritan literature in early and 19th-century America.
Stephen Levin
Associate Professor
Professor Levin explores different modes of constructing selfhood in the contexts of globalization and global crisis, and considers the ways in which these responses sustain or challenge colonial hierarchies.
Lisa Kasmer
Associate Professor (Chair)
Professor Kasmer examines the intersection of traumatic British national events with narratives of shifting national identity in British Romanticism.
Esther Jones
Associate Professor
Professor Jones explores how ethical paradigms respond to embodied difference, and the responses of black women science fiction writers to ethics, empathy, and the politics of difference within medicine.
Betsy Huang
Associate Professor
Professor Huang focuses on the complex ways in which literary and cultural productions participate in the ways in which the “minority,” the citizen, and the human are culturally and legally constituted.
James Elliott
Professor
Professor Elliott explores the publication and reception of late 19-century canonized and non-canonized works, with particular interest in American realism and the writings of James Fenimore Cooper.
Louis Bastien
Lecturer
Dr. Bastien investigates the concept of myth as it pertains to cultural development, using literary texts and techniques gleaned from neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory.
