Welcome to the English Department’s MA graduate website.

Queens College is a selective senior college and has one of the best English departments in the CUNY system. We are proud of our award-winning faculty, which includes internationally renowned fiction writers and poets, specialists on topics ranging from early medieval saints’ lives to Hamlet to Herman Melville. All of our graduate instructors have Ph.D.s and have published important books in their fields (or are working on their first books). Most of the faculty members who teach in our graduate program also teach English courses at the CUNY Graduate Center (rated the top graduate program in English in the country by the 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey). So, you are getting personal instruction from some very distinguished instructors indeed. Our famous “Evening Readings” series, administered by Joe Cuomo, has brought eminent writers like Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, A.S. Byatt, Jamaica Kincaid, and Arthur Miller to campus. Moreover, because of Queens College’s location in New York City, students here can avail themselves of some of the greatest resources in the world. The New York Public Library’s millions of volumes, including rare books and archival materials, are available to students. In addition, poetry readings, experimental off-Broadway dramas, and writers’ workshops help inspire our creative writers. Moreover, our students can take exciting courses offered at major universities nearby. Come visit our scenic campus, explore the impressive Rosenthal Library, and meet our faculty! We look forward to welcoming you to our vibrant, challenging, exciting program.

I have a question; who can I ask?

If you need to get substantive advice about questions like which courses to take or whether you’re in good standing in the program, contact the Director of Graduate Studies in English, John Weir, at mamail@qc.edu or (718) 997-4663. Professor Weir’s hours – and the office hours of the rest of the graduate committee, who can also advise you – will be posted on Professor Weir’s office door – Klapper 614 every semester.

If you need to know a professor’s contact information or where a class meets, contact Ximena, the English Department secretary, at (718) 997-4600.

If you have questions about your registration status, call the Registrar, (718) 997-4400 or check the QUASAR Online Student Services page.

If you have questions about bills, call the Bursar, (718) 997-4500.

If you have a question about a program jointly administered by the English and Secondary Ed. departments, contact either the DGS in English (currently John Weir – contact information listed above) or Professor Arthur Costigan in SEYS (contact via email or phone at (718) 997-5175).

MA in English Literature

Students in this program need to complete 30 credits (10 3-credit courses), mostly in the form of electives (for more information click here), and culminating in a thesis (for more information click here). It usually takes about three years, and students take an average of 2 or 3 courses per semester. Many of our students are high school teachers who need it for their advanced certification, but we also have students who love literature and just want a few more years to study it, as well as students who are thinking about going on for a Ph.D. but want to test the waters first.

The purpose of a master’s degree is to achieve mastery over a field. In other words, if your interest is in the Harlem Renaissance, by the time you finish here you should have read and studied this period intensively, able not only to quote the literature of the period but to discourse knowledgeably about the major critics who work on it and the theoretical models they employ. In order to succeed, then, you need to have a passionate enjoyment of some type of literature and an interest in advanced critical thinking.

MS.Education with specialization in English

This program is jointly administered by the Secondary Education Department and English. Students in this program take 15 credits in SEYS, 15 credits in English. SEYS offers courses that directly train students in dealing with practical problems faced in the classroom, but English courses do something different: we offer you advanced literature courses where you can pursue your own interests. Because most students in the MS.Ed/English program are high-school teachers, we think it is particularly important for you to take a break from your daily work of teaching the same texts the same ways, and to acquire new knowledge: dissecting literature using the latest literary theory, find new ways of looking at familiar texts, discovering books you never knew existed.

Teaching Fellows

This is a highly selective, fast-pased teacher-training program for which you have to apply specially (for more information, click here). Those Teaching Fellows who train to be English teachers must take 12 credits (4 courses) in English: a linguistics course, a theory course, and two electives. The program is administered by SEYS.