At a Glance
34 MA students, 49 PhD students, and 25 graduate faculty.
The English Department has recognized strengths in traditional and new areas of literary and cultural studies (including film and popular culture), creative writing, composition and rhetoric, and Asia/Pacific studies, with particular attention to Hawai‘i. Faculty members are committed to quality research and scholarship, generous public service, and exemplary teaching. The faculty includes award-winning teachers as well as recipients of prestigious state, national, and international research and writing awards. Our graduate students have won fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, and other programs.
The department sponsors readings and talks by visiting writers and scholars during the year. Students may work on journals and conferences, tutor undergraduates, mentor, teach undergraduate courses, intern in the community, and much more.
Students have the opportunity to specialize in one of four areas of concentration while also doing substantial course work in one or more other areas. This program of study is designed to provide a broad overview of the changing field of English studies and of the place that each student’s area of interest occupies within that field. The M.A. in English requires 33 credit hours of course work towards the degree, and each concentration has its set of specific requirements. Click on the links below to see concentration-specific requirement sheets:
Cultural Studies in Asia/Pacific
Recent MA Projects and Theses
“The Rhetorical Function of Women’s Illness Narratives—In the Illness Memoir, Doctor-Patient Conversation, and Online Chronic Illness Communities”
“Crossing the Chasm: Reimagining Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre”
“Han: An Epistolary Memoir”
“Ke Uliuli”
Doctor of Philosophy in English
Recent Dissertations
“Transnational Kinship: Neoliberal Peace And Economic Violence in Vietnamese American Literature And Culture”
“Ulu and Lamp Oil”
“I am a poplarist”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of The Populist Rhetoric of Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign”
”Trugernanner’s Bones: Decolonization and Indigenous Futurity in Palawa Representations”