SPECIALIZATION IN LITERARY STUDY
The English Department offers the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in the major areas of English, American, and Anglophone literature. Building upon a tradition of criticism and scholarship established here by such figures as Randall Jarrell and Amy Charles, the faculty exhibits a healthy diversity of critical training, literary interests, and theoretical emphases. Students are encouraged to devise an individual program of study grounded in foundational texts and literary periods but alert to recent developments in canon-formation and cultural analysis.
Since doctoral candidates usually proceed to positions at colleges requiring a balance of research and undergraduate instruction, Greensboro faculty members take an active interest in helping students learn to cope with the simultaneous demands of teaching and writing. Several members of the English department have won university-wide teaching awards.
Recent faculty publications include books on Julian of Norwich, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, William Shakespeare, free verse, and nineteenth-century American women writers. The presence of a distinguished M.F.A. program offers students of literature the chance to hear and meet the major writers of our own time: recent visitors have included Edward Hirsch, Philip Lopate, Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Linda Gregg, John Irving and Lee Smith.
