Doctor of Philosophy English

Northeastern’s Department of English has a superb cohort of faculty teaching American Literature, from the early period to the twenty-first century.

• Nicole Aljoe‘s work focuses on the slave narrative and issues of archival recovery in American and Caribbean literature.
• Sari Altschuler is an emerging leader in the health humanities and disability studies and co-organizer of the American Studies Association’s Early American Matters Caucus.
• Hillary Chute has helped to define the field of graphic novel and comics studies.
• Theo Davis, whose work focuses on the nineteenth century, has just released a new book on aesthetics and ornamentation in the writings of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau.
• Carla Kaplan, who works on the Harlem Renaissance and women’s biography, is an inaugural Public Fellow with the NEH.
• Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is co-director of the Futures of American Studies Summer Institute at Dartmouth College which our students regularly attend.

Diverse in methodologies and areas focus, our faculty work closely with graduate students on archival research, team projects, and focused training in literary analysis.

Northeastern University is a leader in the emerging field of Digital Humanities. Home to the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science as well as the Digital Scholarship Group housed in the Northeastern University Library, we offer many opportunities for graduate student to pursue DH work, both in classes and as team members working on cutting-edge research projects led by award-winning scholars in the field. Our faculty in this area include:

• Nicole Aljoe (Caribbean literature; literatures of the African diaspora; the slave narrative)
• Ellen Cushman (rhetoric and literacy studies in tribal and urban communities; digital composing and archiving)
• Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (18th-Century American literature; Transatlantic Studies; digital archiving and text analysis)
• Julia Flanders (text markup; data modeling; digital scholarly publishing)
• Lawrence Evalyn (Digital Humanities (digitization, text mining, network analysis); eighteenth-century British literature; book history; queer/trans video game studies; feminist “recovery” in digital archives.)
• K.J. Rawson (digital archives; linked data; queer DH)

Many English Department faculty are affiliated with Northeastern’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program and work in related fields. Graduate students have the opportunity to study with these and WGSS-affiliated faculty in other departments, as well as with other Boston-area scholars through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality. Northeastern University is home to the editorial office for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the flagship journal in the field of feminist theory, and English faculty and graduate students have worked on the publication in various capacities.

• Hillary Chute (gender studies; the graphic novel)
• Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (gender; American literature)
• Laura Green (women’s and gender studies; Victorian literature)
• Carla Kaplan (feminist theory; American and African American literature)
• Lori Lefkovitz (feminist theory; Jewish literature; Hebrew Bible)
• Patrick Mullen (queer theory; Irish and British literature)
• K.J. Rawson (queer theory; trans history; feminist theory)

Our faculty in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Northeastern offer a diverse and complementary array of courses from medieval romance to Shakespeare to 17th-Century poetry to popular prose genres. Critical approaches include ecocriticism & animal studies, gender studies, history of the book, material studies, and digital humanities. Our social/intellectual club “Kankedorts and Cockatrices,” meets regularly to discuss criticism, share work, & attend local theater productions. We are active in the Boston early modern scholarly community with events such as seminars at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center.

• Erika Boeckeler (Shakespeare; Western and Eastern European early modern literature and culture; visual studies; history of the book)
• Kathleen Coyne Kelly (ecocriticism; medieval literature and culture; digital humanities)

The Northeastern English Department is home to the Early Caribbean Digital Archive—a ground-breaking digital humanities project that has been supported by grant funding from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Graduate students have the opportunity to take classes with scholars in the fields of Transatlantic Literary Studies and Caribbean Studies with Professors Nicole Aljoe and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, as well as to be employed developing materials for the ECDA. Graduate students have served as project directors and researchers for the ECDA and have travelled to conferences in the U.S. and the Caribbean to present papers about their work. In addition, a vibrant cohort of graduate students (at both the doctoral and master’s levels) working in the fields of Transatlantic Literary Studies and Caribbean Studies meets regularly in a thesis/dissertation workshop.

• Nicole Aljoe (Caribbean literature; literatures of the African diaspora; the slave narrative)
• Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (transatlantic literary studies; performance studies; early American literature)

Graduate study in Writing and Rhetoric at Northeastern University is focused on five core areas: teaching and assessing writing, community engagement, diversity and identity, multilingual writing, and empirical research methodologies. At Northeastern, teaching and research are interconnected across the various communities in which we work, extending from the university into the city of Boston. Our partnerships also include work with international communities.

• Elizabeth Britt (rhetoric of law; rhetorical theory and criticism; ethnographic theory and methods)
• Ellen Cushman (rhetoric and literacy studies in tribal and urban communities; digital composing and archiving)
• Chris Gallagher (teaching and assessing writing; educational reform; literacy studies)
• Neal Lerner (pedagogy; literacy studies; writing center/writing program administration and writing across the curriculum/in the disciplines)
• Mya Poe (writing assessment; writing across the curriculum; genre studies)
• K.J. Rawson (feminist rhetoric; queer rhetoric; rhetorical historiography)
• Qianqian Zhang-Wu (bi/multilingualism; multilingual writing; translanguaging pedagogy; linguistically responsive instruction; and applied linguistics)