Graduate Admissions
Director of Graduate Admissions
Professor David Schmid
302 Clemens Hall
Email: schmid@buffalo.edu
Phone: 716-645-2575
x1008 (graduate office)
x1010 (admissions)
The doctoral and master's programs of the Department of English at the University at Buffalo are among the most open, flexible, and innovative in the country. They are programs marked by variety and freedom, in which there are virtually no mandated courses, no large lectures, and no required languages. Students are not required to take seminars in any particular order and may pick and choose from a wide range of offerings in such fields as American and British literature, film, psychoanalysis, popular culture, cultural studies, poetics, and critical theory, among many others.
Ours is also a program in which students are active in every phase of the department's operations. A unique system of political parity gives graduate students a powerful voice in departmental operations. Department meetings are open to graduate students, and student representatives sit as voting members in those meetings and in all departmental committees, including the Graduate Review Committee and the Committee on Admissions and Fellowships. The English Graduate Student Association is an active and vital group that elects students to committees, helps form the graduate curriculum, and sponsors lectures, conferences, works-in-progress symposia, and many other events.
Because we are a large program, we are able to offer a wide range of traditional and innovative graduate courses--between twenty and twenty-two each semester--from broad period surveys to focused seminars in theory and methodology. We value this variety as essential to a course of graduate study that engages equally with tradition and with change, whether it be in terms of developments in intellectual inquiry or changes taking place in the academy as a whole.
We also strive to keep the boundaries of the English Department as open and as permeable as possible, so that students are encouraged to take classes in other departments, such as Comparative Literature, History and Romance Languages and Literatures, as a way of satisfying part of their coursework requirements. Students also have the opportunity to participate in interdisciplinary and interdepartmental study groups containing both students and faculty, such as the Early Modern Reading Group and the Cultural Studies of Space Reading Group.
What really sets our program apart from many other English departments, however, is the day-to-day intellectual environment. Both inside and outside seminars, there is an extraordinary amount of good conversation that goes on, both formally and informally, among and between faculty and students, who thrive on sharing with each other the work we do. You will find our department to be a vibrant and thriving intellectual community that is a supportive and stimulating environment in which to do your graduate work.
Important links:
