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English

Doctorate

Application Requirements

Faculty Expertise

Alumni Spotlights

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Application Deadlines

Fall: Dec 1
Spring: n/a
Summer: n/a

School/Department

English

Program Director

Nathan Wolff

Contact

gradadmissions@tufts.edu

Location

Medford/Somerville

Format

On-campus

Commitment Options

Full-time

Average Duration

Varies

Credits

Varies

Overview

The Tufts University PhD program in English provides a supportive and collaborative environment for rigorous graduate study and professional development. As a PhD student in the English Department, you will explore a variety of literary subjects in small graduate seminars. After undergoing supervised training to help you master the necessary skills, you will gain valuable teaching experience by designing and offering your own courses as Graduate Instructor in Tufts' First-Year Writing Program.

Program Outcomes

Tufts will prepare you for a competitive job market by providing strong training and opportunities to serve as independent classroom teachers. Graduates of the English PhD program have won prestigious postdoctoral fellowships, including multi-year teaching fellowships. Recent PhD recipients have secured tenure-track faculty positions as well as other academic positions, such as teachers, program directors, and administrators.

Application Requirements

Application fee
Resume/CV
Personal statement
Writing sample
TOEFL, IELTS, or Duolingo English Test, if applicable
Transcripts
Three letters of recommendation

Tuition and Financial Aid

See Tuition and Financial Aid information.

Faculty Expertise

The English Department at Tufts University provides a supportive, collaborative environment for rigorous graduate study and professional development. Faculty and students work together to ensure all students achieve their goals as thinkers and scholars. The collective expertise of our faculty covers a wide range of historical periods, authors, critical discourses, literary, and aesthetic movements.

Special interests among our faculty include Black cultural studies; Marxist, feminist, and queer perspectives on literature and culture; postcolonial and multicultural studies; visual and material culture; poststructuralist theory; affect theory; science studies; and environmental humanities.

Explore our Department Faculty Profiles

Alumni Spotlights

Diego Millan and Emily King

Together on the Professorial Path

Emily King, PhD in English '12, and Diego Millan, PhD in English '16, met at Tufts and now both teach at the university level.

Graeme Calloway

Born to Teach

Tufts experience showed Graeme Calloway, PhD in English '21, that his 'real passion is being in the classroom'

Faculty

Nathan Wolff

Associate Professor

Nineteenth-century American literature and culture Affect and emotion Politics of New Materialisms Sex, gender, sexuality Critical Theory Democracy, bureaucracy, populism

Amaris Brown

John Holmes Assistant Professor in the Humanities

African American Literature and Culture, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Black Disability Studies, Affect Theory, Black Feminist Thought, Political Theory, Black Visual Cultures, Critical Race Studies

Kevin Dunn

Associate Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora

Lee Edelman

Fletcher Professor of English Literature

Literary Theory (especially Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Post-structuralism) Film Studies

John Fyler

Chaucer Medieval literature (including Dante and the Roman de la Rose) Latin classics and the classical tradition Biblical commentary Gender issues in medieval literature

Judith Haber

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama Renaissance poetry Gender and sexuality studies

Sonia Hofkosh

Associate Professor

British Romantic poetry and prose Feminist/Gender Theory Visual and Material Culture

Jess Keiser

Associate Professor

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Literature History of Science History and Theory of the Novel Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics Philosophy and Literature

Tonhi Lee

Assistant Professor

literature and drama of the English Renaissance; post-Reformation public culture; conversion; citizenship; migration and empire; classical reception; world literature; phenomenology of theater

Joseph Litvak

Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature

Victorian Literature Criticism and Theory Comedy Film and Cultural Studies

John Lurz

Associate Professor

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century British Fiction, especially James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; Literary Theory: semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, phenomenology; Media studies and the history of the book; Roland Barthes; Proust

Sarah Robbins

Assistant Professor

Nineteenth-century African American literature; nineteenth-century American literature; critical bibliography; book history; print culture

Modhumita Roy

Associate Professor and Interim Department Chair of English

Anglophone literatures of Africa and the Africa Diaspora South Asian Literature Litertures of Empire Post-colonial Theory Feminist Theory Literary Theory

Ichiro Takayoshi

Associate Professor

Modern Literature (American, British), Modern Intellectual History (American, British), Aesthetics, Literary Theory

Greg Thomas

Associate Professor

American Literatures in English; African, African-American & African Diaspora Studies; Colonial & Post-Colonial Discourse/ Race & Empire/ Black Radical Traditions; Cultural Studies; Body Politics / Gender & Sexuality Studies; Philosophy and Critical Theory