Report on the Graduate Program
Mike Helfand
The MA/PhD program in our department has continued to flourish and to be recognized by the university and the profession as a center of excellence for its contributions to scholarship and teaching. The Real Guide to Graduate Schools (1997) published by Lingua Franca lists our graduate programs in film studies and composition/rhetoric as among the best five or six in the country and ranks our teaching of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature among the top thirteen in the area.
The University has recognized our achievements by giving us two of the new Faculty of Arts and Science non-teaching fellowships to help us recruit well-qualified applicants. This past year our entering class included, in addition to the FAS fellows, on of the two Provost Humanities fellows in FAS, on Provost Development fellow and one K. Leroy Irvis fellow. Altogether, sixteen students entered as MA candidates and eight as PhD candidates. It is an outstanding group which, we believe, has the potential to make real contributions to the profession.
OUr advanced graduate students continue to do well in FAS-wide competitions for pre-doctoral fellowships. Patrick Mullen, Judy Suh and Daniel Wild, were awarded Mellon fellowships while Patricia Sullivan and Christopher Boettcher received, respectively, Lawler and Chambers-Anderson fellowships. We should also mention that one of our entering MA students, Salome Skvirsky, has just finished shooting and editing a film on baseball in Cuba, a task which delayed her entry into the MA program for a year. It will, we understand, be appearing on PBS. Congratulations to all of them! All in all it has been a good year for the graduate program and the immediate future will, we hope, bring more of the same.