The graduate program of the UCSB Department of English provides the opportunity for students to deepen their knowledge of literary texts, modes, genres, social movements, and periods, thereby to explore their potential as communicators, scholars, and teachers. We have historically emphasized scholarship, criticism, and theory equally, and in recent years have begun to incorporate practice as well.

We are especially strong in media studies and digital humanities; environmental humanities; literary theory; cultural and interdisciplinary studies; race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality studies; Medieval, Renaissance, Eighteenth-century studies; Modernism, and American literature. The program is large enough to field a full range of graduate seminars, but small enough to provide a sense of community and a high level of faculty-student engagement.

link to Graduate Program Handbook

The graduate student experience at UCSB is shaped significantly by our various Research Centers, including:

• Center for Medieval Studies
• Transcriptions Center for Digital Humanities & New Media
•  Literature and Mind
• Literature and Environment
• ACGCC (American Cultures in Global Contexts Center)
• Hemispheric Souths
• COMMA (The Center on Modern Culture, Materialism, and Aesthetics)
• Early Modern Center (EMC)

These centers serve as hubs of intellectual community around which a significant portion of scholarly life in the department organizes itself, and they frequently support ad hoc reading groups, bring speakers to campus, host seminars, and facilitate academic programming with other centers and departments at UCSB.

Our graduate program’s faculty and staff are committed to mentoring students throughout their graduate residency, and to offering meaningful guidance for navigating the job market. Benefiting from our interdisciplinarity and innovative programming, many of our students have gone on to pursue academic jobs in a variety of institutions,  including liberal arts colleges, community colleges, state universities, and RI schools. Still others have chosen to pursue postdoctoral studies, academic staff positions, or to find work in public, private, and nonprofit sectors focusing on communication, editing and publishing, curatorial work, and more.

For further information on job market placement for our graduate alumni, you can reach out directly to the English Staff Graduate Advisor or the Director of Graduate Studies

The English Department has a strong commitment to extending participation in academia to people from all walks of life. We are home to a diverse community of scholars with a deep intellectual commitment to studying the power of language to make worlds. We value the variety of critical approaches to this question of literary world-making that often involve engaging matters of difference and inequality – for example, sexual and gender diversity, class/economic backgrounds, matters of race, neurodiversity, social and environmental justice. We recognize that not only what we study, but also the theories and theorists we choose to cite, often reflect particular intellectual commitments and values that are in no small part informed by our unique life experiences. We value the diversity of our graduate student body to collectively learn together and experience the joyful moments of finding surprising and unexpected areas of commonality between each other’s specific areas of research.

In collaboration with departments across the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, we are actively pursuing a variety of initiatives that welcome students from groups historically under-represented in graduate education.

• Director of  Graduate Studies (DGS)
• Staff Graduate Advisor