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Professionalization

The English Department is strongly committed to training graduate students to become creative teachers, researchers, and thinkers who can excel in a variety of careers. Former PhD graduates have entered into a wide array of careers, including research and teaching in various types of academic institutions, editing, translation, library science, secondary education, for-profit communications, and positions in the non-profit sector. Recognizing that training in literary scholarship leads to a number of career paths, we encourage students early in their training to schedule a personal meeting at the Northwestern Office of Career Placement, which offers advice on valuable opportunities and programming designed to enrich the graduate experience, broaden the skills that our training can offer, and, in later years, support the creation of job materials. The English Department also advises students to take advantage of workshops on career diversity and on the digital humanities offered by the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Former PhDs in our department have moved to tenure-track jobs or postdoctoral fellowships at:

Yale University; Ohio State University; Franklin & Marshall College; Cornell University; Illinois Wesleyan University ; Sewanee: The University of the South; the College of Wooster; SUNY Albany; the University of Southern California;University of Alaska, Fairbanks; the University of Houston, Clear Lake; the University of Pittsburgh; and the University of Texas, Austin.  

Past placements have also included the following positions:

The English Department provides both individual and collective support for job seekers. The Placement Director can help you develop materials as you make applications throughout the year.

In the spring, a preliminary placement meeting is held where prospective job candidates are given information resources in the department and on campus. Students who plan to apply for academic jobs (which begin to appear in late summer and fall in an academic year) will spend the summer engaged in the extensive editing of various required documents (including a CV, job cover letters tailored to different types of institutions, dissertation abstract, teaching statement, diversity statement, and sample syllabi.) Students should have these materials reviewed by their advisor and dissertation committees by the end of summer.

In the fall, the Placement Director arranges workshops of written materials so that students can benefit from the advice of faculty members from other fields. The Placement Director also reviews letters of recommendation, coordinates practice interviews for candidates, and consults individually on any other specific matters as they arise. For candidates invited to give a job talk as a part of an on-campus or virtual visit, we arrange a practice talk, an experience that has proven invaluable to our students -- as a way to get past the normal nervousness inspired by such an event and also as a source of constructive feedback when it matters most. Finally, we are available to consult with candidates in the conversations and institutional negotiations preceding their acceptance of a job offer. We recognize that the current academic job market is challenging in many traditional subfields in English literary studies.

A distinctive feature of Northwestern's PhDs is their cross-disciplinary work in conjunction with such programs as African-American Studies, American Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Gender & Sexuality Studies. Interdisciplinary studies undertaken by recent Ph.D.s also include film, history, history of the book, history of science, music, and photography/ art history/ visual culture.