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Conduct original research within a close-knit community that examines vital connections between literature and culture.

The advanced study of literature at Clark University brings you into deep and sustained engagement with the cultural forces that have shaped societies in the U.S. and around the world. You will immerse yourself in texts that span genres, time periods, and national boundaries. You’ll also analyze the varied contexts in which stories emerge and evolve and choose a specific focus for in-depth research in collaboration with faculty mentors.

Our Master of Arts in English has proven to be ideal preparation for doctoral study and a career in fields ranging from advanced teaching, public policy, and print and digital media, as well as in corporate and nonprofit organizations.

Why Pursue a Master’s in English at Clark University?

  • Earn your M.A. in English in as little as three to four semesters with at least one year of study in residence.
  • Conduct original research with close faculty consultation and complete an extended thesis project.
  • Join one of the few master’s programs in English to offer teaching assistantships and merit-based scholarships.
  • Work with archival resources at major research libraries, including the world-renowned American Antiquarian Society.
Jacqueline Schnieber

A New Take on a Timeless Classic

Jacqueline Schnieber’s master’s thesis considers the broader implications of Ernest Hemingway’s portrayal of non-white characters in his celebrated Nick Adams stories.

Good literature will challenge you to expand your horizon or look at something from a different perspective.
—Jacqueline Schnieber

The Essentials

Program Overview

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 teaching assistantship award).

In addition, students must:

  • Attend the Departmental Colloquia, a noncredit course in which faculty and students present work in progress, share thesis updates, and hear guest speakers.
  • Successfully complete an oral defense of their thesis before two or more faculty readers.

Our students engage capacities and skills that have import within and beyond the study of literature. Such skills entail:

  • Analyzing both written texts and broader cultural narratives that shape the political and social world.
  • Crafting insightful and illuminating arguments.
  • Conducting independent and in-depth research with a range of archival sources.
  • Advanced Studies in Shakespeare
  • Literary Theory and Global Culture
  • Traumatic Tales: British Romantic Literature and Nationhood
  • Special Topics in 19th-century Literature: Queer Victorians
  • Fictions of Empire: Studies in Global English Literature
  • Special Topics in African American Literature: African American Science Fiction
  • Ecologies in Crisis: Views from the Humanities

Requirements

3 to 4 semesters over 1.5 to 2 years

8 course units

  • 2 core courses
    (Introduction to Graduate Studies and a thesis course)
  • 6 electives

Course Catalog

Faculty Research Areas

Meredith Neuman

Meredith Neuman

Associate Professor

Examining the archives of early America

Professor Neuman investigates how sermon auditors helped shape the dominant genre of Puritan literature in early and 19th-century America.
Stephen Levin

Stephen Levin

Associate Professor

Influence of 20th-century global conditions on contemporary culture

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

Lisa Kasmer

Associate Professor (Chair)

How the socio-political milieu, print culture shaped gender politics in Britain

Professor Kasmer examines the intersection of traumatic British national events with narratives of shifting national identity in British Romanticism.
Esther Jones

Esther Jones

Associate Professor

Intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability

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

Betsy Huang

Associate Professor

Examining ‘minority’ identities

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

James Elliott

Professor

Identity politics in late 19th-century literature

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.
Elizabeth Blake

Elizabeth Blake

Professor

Representation of queer pleasure in modernist literature

Professor Blake’s research focuses on the ways queer pleasure is represented in modernist literature, and how those representations come to reshape existing literary forms.
Louis Bastien

Louis Bastien

Lecturer

Linking mythology and culture

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.

Explore what the Department of English has to offer.

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