English (Graduate Program)

For information regarding the UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM, click here.   

Program Overview

The Department of English offers graduate students the opportunity to work with an extraordinarily productive and internationally respected faculty that is particularly strong in interdisciplinary approaches to literature and culture. The department continues to build upon its long-standing strengths in critical theory and literatures of the United States, and is strong in most traditional fields of study, including Renaissance and Early Modern literature and Victorian literature. Special areas of strength include modern and contemporary fiction, film, cultural studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, African American literature, Southern literature, Louisiana and Caribbean studies, post-colonial literature, Global Anglophone literature, rhetoric, and popular culture. The highly ranked MFA program in creative writing combines individualized supervision of student work and literary study. Students admitted to the PhD program can earn their MA in English within the program, and students in both the MFA and PhD programs complete all their coursework in small graduate seminars or workshop classes. Each program is distinguished by its flexibility, allowing the student significant input in determining a departmental-level academic course plan.

Administration

Admission

Applications and supporting materials for all graduate study must be submitted through the online application site for the LSU Graduate School. Official transcripts and other materials that come from third-party sources must be mailed to: LSU Office of Graduate Admissions, 114 West David Boyd Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. These paper documents are stored electronically and departments have access to all materials submitted by and/or on behalf of a student applying to graduate study.

Admission is granted for the fall only. The application deadline for MFA and PhD applicants is January 15. The GRE is not required for admission. A minimum undergraduate GPA of 3.2 is also recommended. International students whose native language is not English must also submit an acceptable TOEFL, IELTS, or PTE score. A writing sample is required of all applicants: eight to ten poems, 20 pages of prose, or a substantial portion of a script for those applying to the MFA program; a 15-20-page sample of sustained critical writing for those applying to the MA or PhD programs. MFA applicants applying in multiple genres should submit samples of each genre in which they are applying, the sample length not exceeding 30 pages. Students should indicate on the writing sample the year it was written and for which degree program, if any.

Financial Assistance

Graduate assistantships are available for most students admitted to graduate study in this department. Editorial assistantships are awarded in conjunction with journals edited in the department. In order to be considered for financial aid, completed applications should be submitted no later than January 15 for PhD and MFA applicants.

Graduate Faculty

(check current faculty listings by department here)

Chris Barrett (7M) • Renaissance British Literature, Ecocriticism, Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton
Jacob Berman (M) • American Literature, Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Theory
Michael P. Bibler (M) • American Studies, Southern Studies, Sexuality Studies, Critical Theory
Jason D. Buch (7M) • Screenwriting
Jimmy Butts (6A) • Rhetoric and Composition
Lauren Coats (M) • American Literature, Digital Humanities,
Kevin L. Cope (M) • 18th Century Literature
Brannon Costello (M) • Southern Literature, American Literature, Comics Studies, Cultural Studies
Rebecca W. Crump (M) • Victorian Literature, Bibliography
Jennifer S. Davis (7M) • Fiction Writing
William W. Demastes (M) • Modern Drama
Femi Euba (M) • Playwriting, Drama, Third World Literature
Ariel Francisco (6A) • Poetry Writing, Translation, Ecopoetics, Latin American Literature
Lara Glenum (7M) • Poetry Writing, International Modernism, The Historical Avant-Garde
Richard Godden (6A) • Medieval Culture, Disability Studies, Chaucer
Zachary L. Godshall (7M) • Screenwriting
Angeletta Gourdine (M) • Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies, African-American Literature, Women’s Studies
Kalling Heck (6A) • Cinema & Media Studies, Global Art Cinema, Critical Theory, Political Theory
Katherine Henninger (7M) • Southern American Literature, Women Writers, Photography and Literature
Benjamin Kahan (M) • British and American modernism, American Literature, Queer Studies
Emily King (7M) • Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama
Mari Kornhauser (M) • Screenwriting
Joseph G. Kronick (M) • American Poetry and Nonfiction Prose, Critical Theory
Saumya Lal (6A) • Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Postcolonial Studies, Affect Studies
Michelle A. Massé (M) • Feminist and Psychoanalytic Theory, Theory of the Novel, 19th Century British and American Literature
Jonathan Osborne (6A) • African American Rhetorics, Rhetorical Theory, Inclusive Pedagogies, Critical Race Theory
Pallavi Rastogi (M) • Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Postcolonial Theory, International Cinema
Christopher Rovee (7M) • 18th- and 19th-Century British Literature, Poetry and Poetic Theory, Literature and the Arts
Maurice Carlos Ruffin (6A) • Fiction Writing, American Literature
Irina Shport (7M) • Linguistics, Secondary English Education
Carolyn Ware (M) • Louisiana Folklore, Women’s Folklore
Susan Weinstein (M) • English Education, Social Literacies, Adolescent Writing
Joshua Wheeler (7M) • Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Fiction
Michelle Zerba (M) • Classics, Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, Rhetoric

RECENT FACULTY PUBLICATIONS
A representative sample of faculty publications during recent years includes the following:

Chris Barrett, Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

Jacob Berman, American Arabesque: Arabs, Islam, and the 19th-Century Imaginary

Michael P. Bibler, Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

Jason Buch, Areceneaux:Melopmeme’s Song

Jimmy Butts, Strangely Rhetorical: Composing Differently with Novelty Devices

Lauren Coats, Digital Texts and Textual Data: A Pedagogical Anthology

Kevin Cope, In and After the Beginning:  Inaugural Moments and Literary Institutions in the Long Eighteenth Century

Brannon Costello, Neon Visions: The Comics of Howard Chaykin

Jennifer S. Davis, We Were Angry: Stories and a Novella

William W. Demastes, Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind

Femi Euba, Craters

Ariel Francisco, Under Capitalism If Your Head Hurts They Just Yank Off Your Head and A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship

Lara Glenum, Pop Corpse and All Hopped Up on Fleshy Dumdums

Richard Godden, Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Zack Godshall, The Laughing Man

Angeletta Gourdine, The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity

Kalling Heck, After Authority: Global Art Cinema and Political Transition 

Katherine Henninger, Ordering the Façade: Photography in Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing

Benjamin Kahan, The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality

Emily King, Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge

Mari Kornhauser, Treme and Kitchen Privileges

Joseph Kronick, Derrida and the Future of Literature

Saumya Lal, “Silence and the Ethics of Partial Empathy in Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim”

Michelle Massé, Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Labor in Language and Literature Workplaces

Jonathan Osborne, Landmark Essays on Rhetorics of Difference

Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century

Christopher Rovee, Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism​

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, We Cast a Shadow and The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You

Irina Shport, “Kyoo, this word sounds weird! A case study of a Cajun English interjection.”

Carolyn Ware, “The Croatian American Society: A Case Study in Adaptation and Resilience.”

Susan Weinstein, The Room is on Fire: The History, Pedagogy, and Practice of Youth Spoken Poetry 

Joshua Wheeler, Acid West: Essays

Michelle Zerba, Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection

Programs

• English, M.A.

• Creative Writing, M.F.A.

• English, Ph.D.