PhD in Cultural Critical Studies
Overview
The Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh has been at the forefront of reinventing English studies, and our PhD program has been central to this endeavor.
Organized by the theoretical and interdisciplinary emphasis of cultural and critical studies, the five to six year PhD program fosters challenging and inventive work in the ongoing project of English studies, broadly conceived. Our program encourages students to think across and beyond disciplinary or programmatic boundaries, and to engage with issues in cultural history, knowledge formation, creative intellectual practice, media studies, and critical pedagogy. Our program in Cultural and Critical Studies addresses the intellectual opportunities and the professional needs of a discipline experiencing fundamental change.
In the Times Literary Supplement, Christopher Hitchens acclaimed our program as one of the first in America to redefine English studies. In Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Gerald Graff lists our program as one of the pioneers in disciplinary change. Recognizing the need to combine scholarly rigor with the challenge of new thinking and objects of study, the program is based on a commitment to ground research and teaching in a continuing process of self-scrutiny made possible by serious engagement with the theoretical and critical debates of the time.
Recently our program was honored by being selected as one of seven participating departments in the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate.
