Launch Your Literary Career
This page includes a comprehensive list of the Literary Career Program's current and forthcoming resources, as well as our motivation statement. Please see our "Mentorship" and "Professional Development Funding" pages for further details.
Career Support Resources
Motivation
The career prospects of our department’s students are changing. While technological innovations are creating new literary careers, Covid-19, among other factors, has interrupted the academic hiring process for tenure-track positions in the humanities. The department has already recognized these shifts in our panels and classes connecting current students with alumni who have developed successful, intellectually fulfilling careers. The training that we receive in English is marketable and in demand. Every organization needs communicators, scholars, storytellers, writers, designers, and project managers—and there are entire industries that rely primarily on humanities learning, such as curriculum design, EdTech, English teaching, nonprofit work, curating, and publishing. Yet, to equip ourselves for our new professional conditions, our responsibilities as a department have increased.
The Literary Careers Program is designed to help students identify, pursue, and obtain intellectually fulfilling, gainful employment. We will expand the department’s ongoing efforts and offer more practical support: guiding students through the processes of resume and CV building, developing technological skills, and seeking internships early in the PhD. This program is part of our ongoing work to recognize that each student’s work towards developing their career comes with different challenges and degrees of urgency, due to inequities related to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. For younger graduate students in particular, what it means to be a scholar in the twenty-first century has changed.
The Literary Careers Program is seizing this chance to identify, explore, and make space for English Department graduates in an increasing number of career fields that will leverage our training to support intellectually fulfilling lives.