The University of Pittsburgh's Department of English has been at the forefront of reinventing English studies, and our doctoral program has been central to this endeavor.
Organized by the theoretical and interdisciplinary emphasis of critical and cultural studies, our five-year doctoral program fosters challenging and inventive work in the ongoing project of English Studies, broadly conceived. With concentrations in literature, film, and composition, our program encourages students to think across and beyond disciplinary and programmatic boundaries, and to engage with issues in cultural history, knowledge formation, creative intellectual practice, media studies, and critical pedagogy. Our English PhD addresses the intellectual opportunities and the professional needs of a discipline experiencing fundamental change.
Because we recognize the need to combine scholarly rigor with the challenge of new thinking and objects of study, we have designed the program 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.
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