Literary and Cultural Studies

Photo credit: Craig Chandler | University Communications

Literature teaches us to engage with the past and with others. Whether we are looking at sonnets by Shakespeare, Science Fiction short stories, or novels by Chinua Achebe, Virginia Woolf, or Junot Diaz, we are moving across imaginative boundaries: into the past or into the literary culture of a different society. The study of literature makes us aware of our own distinctiveness, as well as the uniqueness of these other places and times. The study of literature at UNL is varied and cosmopolitan. A UNL literary student might work one semester on Milton or Renaissance London; another on the poetry of contemporary Africa; and then move back to the United States, to read Native American writing or the Harlem Renaissance. Literary study is a bridge into different imaginative realms; it encourages us to read closely and to read deeply, to lose ourselves in a created world, but then to come back to our current realities with fresh eyes.

Undergraduate Literary and Cultural Studies

Undergraduate students with interests in literature have a variety of opportunities to develop their interests in:

British Literature
American Literature
Ethnic Literatures (including African American, Irish, Chicana(o) American, Asian, Native American, and Jewish American)
World Literatures (including Canadian, African, Caribbean, and European)
Film History, Theory, and Criticism
Literary History
Literary Criticism and Theory
Literary Genres (such as poetry, drama, fiction, life-writing, and environmental literature)

Literature students may also pursue a Literary and Cultural Studies concentration.

UNL students who graduate with an English major in literature pursue a variety of career and professional work, including

Graduate and professional school (including law, graduate study in English, and graduate school in education)
Advertising
Publishing and editing
Teaching

Graduate Literary and Cultural Studies

The Department of English offers diverse and innovative graduate degree programs in many areas of Literary and Cultural Studies. Graduate students who wish to pursue Literary and Cultural Studies have opportunities to work closely with faculty and design individualized M.A. and Ph.D. programs of study. Graduate Faculty members in Literary and Cultural Studies work on varied scholarly projects, share a commitment to the analysis of literature within larger cultural, social and political contexts, and utilize a wide range of critical methodologies, such as textual recovery, archival work, digital scholarship, and theoretical analyses. We offer graduate degree emphases in the following areas of Literary and Cultural Studies:

Ethnic Literatures (including African American, U.S. Latina/o and Chicana/o, Native American, African, Afro-Caribbean, and Irish literatures)
Women’s Literature
Medieval and Renaissance Literatures
Nineteenth-Century Literatures (including American literatures and eighteenth-century, Romantic, and Victorian British literatures)
Twentieth-Century Literatures (including American literatures and British modernism)
Place-Based Writing (including literatures of the Great Plains and the American West)

Literary and Cultural Studies

Literary and Cultural Studies

Undergraduate Literary and Cultural Studies

Graduate Literary and Cultural Studies

Literary & Cultural Studies Faculty