Master of Arts in English
Program in American and British Literature
The Program and Faculty
Why study literature at the graduate level? Perhaps you're contemplating a career in academia; perhaps you want to get credentials for a promotion; perhaps you simply want to enrich your reading experience by discussing and analyzing literature at a higher level. Whatever your motivation, Kansas State University's Department of English offers opportunities for you.
K-State's M.A. program offers coverage in historic American and British authors such as John Milton, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. But it also features courses in emergent disciplines such as African-American, Asian-American, African, Irish, children's and adolescent literatures, science fiction, and crime fiction, together with training in feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist theories. Sharing a commitment to classics and to contemporary literature, to traditional and to new forms of criticism, K-State's faculty embraces the opportunity to work with students individually to help them discover their gifts and to hone their critical acumen. We love what we do and are invested in our students, who benefit from the opportunity to study in an encouraging environment as they decide what their next step should be--whether further graduate school or gainful employment.
Financial Aid
Most graduate students are eligible to receive financial aid in the form of Graduate Teaching Assistantships. There are also other grants and awards available. For further information, consult the Graduate Program page.
The M.A. Project
An important feature of our program is the M.A. Project, an article-length critical piece that attests to the student's successful apprenticeship in graduate work. Individually determined and offering the opportunity to work closely with faculty members, Literature M.A. projects are as diverse as the students who write them. Recent projects have studied themes of liberty in eighteenth-century women's drama; gender and eating-disordered behavior in Don DeLillo; Jeanette Winterson's author-reader dialogues; John Fowles' convention-breaking text The Magus; and the medieval fifteen-fold prayer.
Life Beyond K-State
Graduates from our program have gone on to such careers as professors in English and in religious studies, as teachers in community colleges and high schools; they have pursued the law and business and technical writing.
Visiting Scholars
Not only do students benefit from learning from the award-winning faculty here, they also have the opportunity to listen to internationally important scholars. Recent visiting speakers have included T.A. Shippey, seminal critic of J.R.R. Tolkien; Michael Denning, who writes passionately about global working-class fiction; Yopie Prins, an innovative critic of Victorian poetry and sexuality
Our other graduate tracks further enrich opportunities for learning. The Creative Writing program hosts numbers of visiting writers every year. Recent visitors have included E. Annie Proulx, Bret Lott, Barry Lopez, Yusef Komunyakaa, William Kittredge, and Mary Karr. The Cultural Studies program runs an annual symposium that attracts participants from around the world and from a variety of disciplines. Past keynote speakers have included Stephanie Coontz, Carter Revard, Lawrence Grossberg, Amitava Kumar, Bruce Robbins, Ginu Kamani, Joel Barraquiel Tan, Katherine Hayles, and Nancy Kress.
The Community
In addition to sponsoring visiting speakers, K-State fosters an active intellectual community by holding a monthly colloquium featuring KSU faculty and graduate students. We remind ourselves of the pleasure of simply experiencing literature by conducting readers' theater and discussion groups that offer the opportunity for learning, conversation, and entertainment in a setting less formal than that of the classroom. At each year's holiday party, the literature program (with the able aid of colleagues) performs excerpts of Restoration farces, to the great amusement (whether at the play or at the acting) of the bystanders. Within the College of Arts and Sciences, the Women's Studies program offers a graduate certificate, which many of our students earn in addition to the M.A. in English..
For More Information consult the Graduate Program's main page or write:
Director, Program in Literature
Department of English
English/Counseling Services Building
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506-6501
785.532.6716
gradeng@ksu.edu
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