The Department of English warmly welcomes qualified applicants who wish to pursue advanced study towards an M.A. or a Ph.D. degree. We are a large department and value historical coverage of the field that has traditionally been the study of English and American literature: we also encourage innovative approaches to that study, and have an expansive sense of the topics it might cover. We teach in all areas and currently have particular research clusters among our faculty and graduate students in Medieval and Renaissance, modernist, post-colonial, Latino/Latina, American and African American literatures. We maintain close ties with the Department of Comparative Literature, with which we jointly organize a certificate in Poetics and Theory, and with the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In addition, our graduate students originate, organize and receive funding for their own reading groups, which currently include Cultures of War and the Post-War, Digital Experiments, the Early American Colloquium, the Early Modern Studies Group, the Eighteenth-Century British Literature Workshop, From Farm to Text, the Literary Theory Reading Group, the Medieval Forum, the Modern and Contemporary Colloquium, New York Scapes, the Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium, Reading Marx, and Unpopular Culture.