Welcome to English Graduate Studies at Albany

English studies is a rapidly changing discipline embracing a number of related fields, from British, U.S., Anglophone, and postcolonial literatures to critical theory, creative writing and new media, rhetoric and composition, pedagogy, and media and cultural studies. Our program at Albany responds to these developments by combining the traditional strengths of historically and textually based modes of analysis with new theoretical approaches.

Our distinguished faculty provides a graduate education as relevant as it is rigorous. According to the most recent 2005-2006 data provided by Academic Analytics, a national academic evaluation organization that measures indicators such as faculty publications, citations, and national awards, the Albany Ph.D. program faculty rank among the top 20 percent of all programs in the U.S. in terms of faculty scholarly productivity.

The graduate program imagines English studies as a network of permeable, overlapping, and recombinant areas of creative and critical inquiry. We therefore employ a four-part concentration structure that is both focused and flexible, promoting ways for our faculty and students to explore convergences and departures of intellectual, writerly, and interdisciplinary interests that will also have a recognizable relation to more established versions of the discipline. Our program is thus committed to investigating a variety of ways to bring the complex traditions of literary and language study into the 21st century.