Department of English

Graduate Studies in Composition

Graduate Studies in Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric

Graduate students in composition at Pitt work in a unique institutional and intellectual context—the program in Critical and Cultural Studies. One of the earliest graduate programs to re-conceptualize doctoral study in English, it has included composition from its inception. Pitt’s graduate program has long considered its students to be intellectuals who can define their own projects across established academic boundaries, teach their own courses in an articulate and critical community of teachers, and participate and vote in open departmental deliberations. As part of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, the program continues to involve its doctoral students in innovative thought and practice that will help shape the future of English studies.

Faculty

Graduate students in composition study with Pitt’s distinguished composition faculty, who work in a range of fields typically affiliated with composition—literacy studies, pedagogy, rhetoric—and also in the fields of American studies, women’s studies, history of the book, hermeneutics, poetry and poetics, literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, women’s literature, working-class literature, and several periods of British and American literature, especially the early modern and the nineteenth centuries. Our most recent additions to the composition faculty have brought new interests in classical rhetoric, history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, Bakhtin, Burke, and body studies. Composition faculty members are productive scholars whose books, awards, and graduate seminars exemplify this broad range of interests.

In all their fields of scholarship, composition faculty members share an interest in teaching and learning as reflective practices and serious areas of inquiry. They also share a commitment to regularly teaching undergraduate writing and reading courses and to mentoring graduate students.

Pitt’s graduate students in composition also work with other faculty members whose primary commitment is to critical, cultural, literary, and film studies. The courses of these faculty members have often informed the projects and dissertations of Pitt’s doctoral students in composition, and faculty from across the department frequently participate on project and dissertation committees of composition students.

Teaching Opportunities

After a year on non-teaching fellowship, doctoral students will teach Pitt’s freshman Seminar in Composition while participating in the graduate Seminar on Pedagogy, a course that engages students in critical reflection on teaching across the fields of English and on the institutional, professional, and political contexts in which that teaching takes place. Doctoral students also have the opportunity to teach a number of courses beyond Seminar in Composition, including writing-intensive literature, film, and women’s studies courses and specialized composition courses in basic writing, research writing, and public and professional writing. Advanced graduate students have the opportunity to mentor new teaching assistants through the Committee for the Evaluation and Advancement of Teaching.

Other Opportunities

Graduate students can also gain mentoring and administrative experience working with the Composition Program, the Writing Center, or the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project (Pitt’s National Writing Project site), as well as experience in scholarly publishing by working on the journal Reader or the University of Pittsburgh Press series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture.

Dissertations and Careers

The many doctoral students from Pitt who have gone on to make contributions to the field of composition and rhetoric have done work that reflects these diverse opportunities. In the past decade they have written dissertations drawing on wide-ranging archives of literary, pedagogical, public, and institutional texts. The Nietz Collection of American school books at Pitt’s Hillman Library has been a rich source. Students have investigated literate practices in relation to particular social movements and political debates. They have examined how new readers and writers are disciplined into literate practices and have critiqued narratives of teaching that marginalize or misperceive students. Frequently their projects have arisen out of and returned to practices in the classroom and attention to various forms and contexts of student writing. The projects and dissertation topics of our current graduate students exemplify the range and vitality of the program.

Pitt’s doctoral students in composition create distinctive projects that link problems of reading, writing, and teaching to current institutions, disciplines, and debates in English studies. Many of these projects have resulted in significant scholarly publications by graduates of the program. They have also informed the work of our graduates in administrative leadership and curricular innovation. Pitt’s composition PhDs consistently find tenure-track positions in high-quality English departments across the country and build satisfying careers contributing to their fields.

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