The Department of English

Texas A&M University

The Department of English, the largest and the oldest department in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A & M University, is currently enjoying a period of rapid progress and enrichment. We have recently been awarded five new tenured or tenure-track lines to be filled over the next two years. Our innovative and recently redesigned curriculum offers a range of concentrations: African-American Literature, American Studies, Comparative Literature and Culture, Creative Writing, Discourse Studies, Film Studies, Gender Studies, New Modern British Studies, and Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Graduate classes are capped at around twelve students, and so our graduate students enjoy close interaction with faculty. We offer highly competitive packages of financial support, and provide our students with a wealth of resources including research and travel funding; we publish eight scholarly journals in the department (including Callaloo, Journal of American Folklore, and South Central Review); we are also home to the Shakespeare Bibliography and the Donne Variorum Project. The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research also provides many intellectual and financial opportunities for graduate students.

Graduate students at the fall meeting

As the leading humanities program within a large public university serving a diverse population, The Department of English at Texas A&M University takes seriously its ethical obligation to provide high quality doctoral training for its students. With the new ideas and new strategies that will emerge through our participation in the CID, our Ph.D. graduates will be increasingly well-situated to provide intellectual leadership within the discipline. For more information, please visit our Graduate English Program webpage here.

Contact Information

The CID leadership team is: Dr. Valerie Balester, Abby Bowers, Dr. Douglas Brooks, Dr. Kimberly Brown, Jaemin Choi, David Cockley, Dragana Djordjevic, Chris Garrett, Meghan Gilbert, Julie Groesch, Dr. Jim Harner, Ki Yoon Jang, Dr. Katherine Kelly, Dr. Shari Kendall, Dr. Jimmie Killingsworth, Dr. J. Lawrence Mitchell, Amy Montz, Gina Opdycke, Dr. Victoria Rosner, Asmahan Sallah, Sarah Spring, Dr. Susan Stabile, Dr. Jan Swearingen, Mick White, Anne Marie Womack

For information about our role in the CID, please contact: Dr. Victoria Rosner, Associate Director of Graduate Studies; Department of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843; vpr@tamu.edu

Our Goals for the CID

We consider this initiative vital to our mission of providing access and support in the spirit of a more thoroughly democratized educational environment. Our theme for this year's involvement in the CID, "Building Inclusive Intellectual Communities," responds to our department's beliefs in empowering our graduate students and engaging faculty and graduate students in intellectual and professional discussions, both in and out of the classroom.

Initiatives Under the CID

Writing for Publication Seminar: This seminar is inspired by two goals of the CID: professional training and the pedagogy of research. Over a semester, ABD students enrolled in the seminar will learn what a publishable article is and explore the professional standards that guide scholarly research and writing.

Curriculum Revision: Over the past year, we have reoriented our curriculum around our faculty interest groups. The interest groups (or concentrations) help promote academic communities between faculty and graduate students based on similar scholarly interests and concerns.

Review of Departmental Work, 2003-2004

Timeline

Academic Year 2004-2005: Over the course of the next year, we will design experiments to help us deepen, enrich, and extend the intellectual community with the department for graduate students and faculty alike. Our challenges this year include reconceiving the core courses for Ph.D. students, redesigning the preliminary exam structure, expanding faculty working groups to include more graduate student participation, and more.

We also plan to develop colloquia on teaching literature for graduate students. These roundtable discussions will encourage dialogue among faculty members and graduate students on the teaching of literature within different fields.

Fall 2005: Our English and History departments are sponsoring a conference inspired by the CID's call for interdisciplinary work. This conference, "Shifting Boundaries: The Humanities Doctorate in the 21st Century," will focus on three main points: information technology and its role in reshaping the doctorate and disciplines, interdisciplinarity, and internationalization, both in terms of topic ("world English," "world history") and in terms of students and scholars.

Website by Amy Montz