Three things particularly distinguish study in the Department at Chicago: the high level of intellectual discourse, informed by continuing attention to intellectual history and theory; strong commitment to historical research; and the broadly interdisciplinary character of our intellectual lives.  All three make our programs in British literature and culture particularly noteworthy.

Our commitment to the long history of Anglophone literatures and cultures is perhaps most evident in the strength of our faculty and student work in the Renaissance and the Eighteenth-Nineteenth Centuries.  We also have powerful clusters in a number of other areas that combine the resources of Departmental and other University faculty, brought together by faculty-graduate student workshops, centers, committees, and institutes in which we are heavily involved.  For example, students will find rich resources in Medieval Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Theater and Performance, gender and race, and colonial, post-colonial, and transnational areas (in conjunction with centers for South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American studies).   The English Department also has significant groups of faculty working on law and literature (Cormack, Slauter), politics and political theory (Hadley); philosophy and literature (Miller, Schleusener, Izenberg); aesthetic theory and relations between literature and the visual and material arts (Mitchell, Helsinger, Slauter, Cormack, Brown); and psychoanalytic theory and criticism (Ruddick, Veeder).  We maintain multiple connections with the Department of Comparative Literature and commitments to language study.  And of course, our outstanding Americanist faculty share interests, students, and conversations continually with the faculty listed below.

Of particular interest to students working in British literature and culture is the University’s Nicholson Center for British Studies, which offers an annual lecture series, brown-bag lunches for student presentations, and several year-long dissertation research fellowships as well as short term research grants for students who need to do research in Britain.  Our undergraduate program  in London, coordinated through the Nicholson Center, employs one graduate student as program assistant in the fall term each year.  Other University resources for students in British literature and culture include the Center for Gender Studies and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; and the Franke Institute for the Humanities (directed by James Chandler of our department).  All these regularly sponsor lectures, conferences, symposia, workshops, and exhibitions, and offer doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships.

The ethos of cooperative work extends to close relations with colleagues at area universities and libraries (Northwestern, UIC, Loyola, Roosevelt, DePaul, and others), including individual co-teaching arrangements and the more formal consortia in Medieval and Renaissance studies facilitated by the Newberry Library, itself an important resource.