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The department requires students to fulfill the following requirements for a Master's Degree in English:

• 8 Courses (24 credit hours) with an average grade of B or above: at least 5 courses at the 700-level (graduate student courses), with three additional courses at the 600-level (advanced undergraduate) courses or 6 courses at the 700-level and 2 courses at 600-level. A number of credit hours are allotted for doing thesis research; these courses receive a grade of Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory only.


• Foreign Language Requirement: this requirement may be fulfilled by passing a reading/translation proficiency test, which is administered once each semester by the Department of Romance languages, and arranged on an individual basis by the Departments of Classics and German. Alternatively, a student may complete any one of the following: Spanish 197, 213,  217 or 218 , French 197, 213,  215 or 216, Italian 215 or 216, German 153x, Greek 211 or 212, Latin 211, 212, 216, or 218 with a grade of B. Other languages may be accepted upon approval by the graduate committee. While no individual language course taken as an undergraduate may be used to fulfill the language requirement, evidence of eighteen hours (six semesters) of undergraduate work in a single language will be accepted as fulfilling the requirement.


• In the second year: by the time students have completed their course and language requirements, and upon recommendation of the English Department, they may apply for Degree Candidacy. At this point, the student will work with a thesis adviser; two additional faculty members will be added to the committee for the purpose of the thesis defense. Students are expected to complete their thesis with one additional semester's work. Recent theses emerging from the program have been wide-ranging in their scope. Click here to see some recent theses.