University of Pittsburgh, MA, English

Our two-year Master of Arts degree is based on a commitment to ground the study of texts and discourses in a serious engagement with the theoretical and critical debates of our time. We encourage 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. Although the MA is a terminal degree, all students take courses offered in conjunction with our PhD program in Cultural and Critical Studies. Students can elect to concentrate their elective work broadly across English studies, or they can focus their coursework in the programmatic areas of the department: composition, film studies, and literature (with focal areas such as Children's Literatre and Childhood Studies; Genealogies of Modernity: Medieval and Early Modern; Media and Material Practices; and Race, Poetics, and Empire). Students enter our MA program for a variety of reasons, though all are interested in gaining more advanced work in English before moving on to a PhD program or to careers in the public or private sector.