MA/PhD Program Placement Information

Despite the difficult job market in our field, students who have completed their Ph.D. in English at UCSB have done quite well.  Indeed, most of our graduates who have sought an academic position (and have been patient in their search) have found one.  Others have changed their employment goals, whether because of personal situations (often spousal) or because of an altered sense of what they really want to do, and they too have made very good use of their degrees.

To give a more concrete idea of this performance, students who have completed our program in the last eight years or so now hold tenure-track positions at the following colleges and universities:

Other graduates of the program now hold the following positions:

• Assistant Director of Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication
• Irish Poetry editor of PN Review
• Department Head, English Department, Marlborough School, Los Angeles
• Program Officer, Jewish Community Endowment Fund (grant making in Arts, Culture and Education)
• Publications manager for the California State University Institute for Teaching and Learning and Managing Editor for Exchanges, an on-line journal of teaching and learning at CSU.
• Associate Literary Agent, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
• Lecturer, English department, UCSB (2 positions)
• Judicial clerk, US Court of Appeals, New York
• Attorney, clerking for Justice of the State Supreme Court in SLC, Utah
• Adjunct instructor, Honors Program, University of Utah, SLC

Our students have also done well in the competition for post-doctoral fellowships.  Here are some post-docs our former students now hold or have recently held:

• Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral fellow in American Literature, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998-2000 (presently at CSU Los Angeles)
• Post-doctoral Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (on leave from position at University of Iowa)
• Post-doctoral position at the University of Texas at Galveston
• Mellon Post-doctoral research/teaching position at University of Colorado, Boulder
• Post-doctoral position at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, 2003-2004 (on leave from position at Idaho State University)
• Faculty Fellows post-doctoral position in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 2003-2004

See our partial list of Postdoctoral fellowship opportunities for more information.