Graduate
Graduate
Graduate Admissions
Learn more
Program Description
Learn more
Welcome from the Director of Graduate Studies
Our graduate students come from across the globe, with a huge range of life experiences, tastes, and talents. Graduate education in the Harvard English Department is about helping each of our unique students become the scholar, teacher, writer, reader, mentor, and citizen they want to be. To that end, we have rigorous requirements: exams, coursework, and, of course, the dissertation, all of which help inspire the next generation of leading scholars of English literature. But we also know that university teaching and research is only one possible career for our graduates. Academia is undergoing immense changes; no two students’ paths—through our program and after it—will look the same. Thus we train students for professional success in academia while simultaneously preparing them for a wide range of other lives and careers. Read more.