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.
About Targeted Admissions
“Media aesthetics” 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.