All doctoral students in the Department of English participate in department research collectives based on areas of curricular specialization in the department. These curricular specializations form the basis of our innovative degree structure and facilitate abundant opportunities for intellectual engagement outside of the seminar room. In addition to offering coursework in these areas, faculty and students host distinguished lectures, film screenings, colloquia, and workshops. 

Students choose their area of curricular specialization by the end of their first year.  Please see below for an overview of all the curricular specializations, with links to more details about each specialization area.

Important Note: Our Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Rhetoric, Composition, and Pedagogy is distinct from our Ph.D. in English. The programs differ in requirements and disciplinary context.

Learn about our unique Ph.D. in English – RCP Concentration on our website. 

Critical Studies of the Americas   

Critical Studies of the Americas encompasses a range of literary, historical, and disciplinary approaches, related to the study of the Americas. These include but are not limited to: African American and African Diaspora Studies; American Studies; Asian American Studies; Caribbean Studies; Critical Race and Ethnic Studies; Indigenous Studies; and Latin American and Latinx Studies and their accompanying literary focuses. The Critical Studies of the Americas specialization emphasizes transnational, multilingual, and interdisciplinary approaches that intersect with the department’s concentrations in Empire Studies, Translation, Environmental Humanities, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Critical Studies of the Americas courses are attentive to issues of difference and power, evoking theoretical paradigms that reimagine the political and economic realities of the Americas.

Critical Poetics    

Critical Poetics affords theoretically and textually informed ways of thinking about and within genres, articulating poetics as a method as much as an object of inquiry. To this end, Critical Poetics includes but is not limited to the close study of poetics and poetry across periods, both Early (whether Medieval, Shakespearean, Early American) and Modern/Contemporary, extending to investigations of narrative/narrative theory, rhetoric, literary theory and other formalisms (including those engaged with affect theory and queer theory), critique and post-critique. Critical Poetics is committed to the imbrication of research and imagination; to the material conditions of making and knowing; to language difference (resisting the traps of monolingualism) and variation across expressive media, history, culture, and experience.

Empire Studies  

Empire Studies explores how the ideologies and practices of empire have shaped Western and global writing. How has empire created structures of violence and hegemony that pervade and are enacted through literary texts? How has it created global linguistic hierarchies; achieved technological advances to service racial capitalism; contrived political forms promising universality while enacting ethnic and civilizational myths; and normalized exploitation, dispossession, and planetary hierarchies through liberal ideology? How has modernity emerged out of empire’s bloodied infrastructures of printing, transportation, and plantation agriculture? What afterlives did these infrastructures and ideologies initiate in the postcolonial era, from nationalistic enthusiasm to Western nostalgia for cultural imperialism? Empire Studies courses aim both to theorize new models for the critique of empire and to promote the interdisciplinary exchange of research at the University of Houston. Courses will treat a range of historical formations, from the European colonial empires to more recent formations in the Global South and the current U.S. geopolitical hegemon.

Translingual Studies  

Translingual Studies promotes research and writing at the intersection of different languages, where the cultural, literary, and linguistic conditioning of meaning is exposed and enriched by contact between one language and another. We are interested in multilingual negotiations, whether within and between texts or within the experience of polyglot speakers. This specialization embraces the whole history of translingual phenomena, from tracing the mythic beginnings of linguistic difference in scenes such as the Tower of Babel to interrogating the modern ideologies that center monolingual concepts and texts and maintain linguistic stratification.  Translingual Studies also encourages study of the relations between different works and forms of art, literary traditions, modes of discourse, and disciplines. Encompassing Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, Adaptation and Performance Studies, Hermeneutics and Interpretation Studies, Language and Literacy Studies, and Sociolinguistics (theoretical and field work), Translingual Studies aims to bring these areas of study into productive contact with each other through interdisciplinary collaboration and creative methodologies, in both our curricula and research.