Since its founding the English Department at the University of Chicago has committed to questioning and reformulating the basic principles of literary study. Once famous for the Aristotelian Chicago School of criticism of the 1950s, today the Department, ranked first among English departments in the US, stands out for its interdisciplinary approach to literature and its commitment to close reading combined with historical and conceptual analysis.
Our coverage of chronological fields extends from the medieval era to the twenty-first century, and includes a wide variety of subfields, media, and genres, including graphic narrative, comics, and video games, theatre, cinema, and visual culture, poetry and poetics, fiction and nonfiction, gender and race studies, literary and cultural theory, global Anglophone writing, animal and posthuman studies, psychoanalysis and affect studies, ecocriticism and climate change. Graduate workshops offer students and faculty opportunities to share work in progress and to read, hear, and discuss current work by scholars from other institutions. The department also supports three distinguished journals, Modern Philology, Critical Inquiry, and Chicago Review, the last of which is run by our graduate students. A vibrant new major in Creative Writing offers students the opportunity to develop their talents in poetry, drama, fiction, nonfiction, and digital media, as well as to participate in an ongoing program of readings and workshops with visiting writers.
2025-26 Admissions Theme: Environmental Humanities
For the 2025-2026 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is prioritizing applications focusing on literature and culture in relation to environment, ecology, and space. Possible areas of interest include (but are not limited to) the environmental humanities; built environments and literature; geography and urbanization; the atmosphere and setting of literary and artistic works and circles; ecopoetics; the poetics and politics of space. We encourage applications from students wishing to work in all historical periods, and on texts from and about any region of the world. We welcome hybrid scholars working in creative and critical modes or across media, or doing public humanities and public-facing work that foregrounds environmental and spatial concerns. For more information on faculty and current graduate students in this area, please visit the department website.
You may indicate up to five Areas of Study in which you are interested, in ranked order.
The application for Autumn 2025 will open in the fall.
About Targeted Admissions
“Environmental Humanities” is part of a multiyear area of focus for the University of Chicago’s Department of English, in “Literary Worlds and Worldings.” This area will be our focus for the next three years, with each year emphasizing a different theme within this broad topic:
| Year 1 (2024–25) | Media aesthetics involves a wide range of questions about how distinct mediums (print, theater, film, digital media, etc.) shape aesthetic experience; and/or historical and cultural approaches to media and mediation. It could intersect with any historical period and with a variety of other traditional (or nontraditional) subfields. It can be transnational and multilinguistic in scope. | |
| Year 2 (2025–26) |
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| Year 3 (2026–27) | Transnational literature, migration, and movement, including decolonial literatures, speculative fictions, the movement of cultural meaning, and translation. |
We are excited about this multiyear admissions initiative, and believe the English department has much to offer incoming graduate students working in these areas of study.
