The requirements for an MA degree in English consist of 21 credit hours in courses numbered 300 or above, successful completion of a comprehensive examination, and a thesis along with any additional prerequisite courses determined by the department to make up for deficiencies in undergraduate preparation.
Students working for an
MA degree in English Language must take English 301, 327, 341 or 342, and 345. Two additional elective English Language graduate courses from among those offered in the department must be taken. Students must take a further graduate course, which may be from outside the English language course offerings, subject to departmental approval.
Students working for the degree of MA in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) should refer to the Department of Education catalogue section.
Students working for an
MA degree in English Literature must complete English 301. In addition, they must take one course from each of the following three categories: Literary History, Comparative Literature, and Literary and Cultural Studies. Of the remaining three courses, two may be taken outside the Literature program, subject to departmental approval.
For more information about the MA program in English Language and Literature, click
here.
Also, check out the
MA Graduate flyer.
Draft description of the graduate courses for SPRING 2025 - 2026
ENGL 309H: War and the Global South in Literature
Professor Yasmine Khayyat
Overview
This course examines how war, occupation, revolution, and political violence are represented, theorized, and formally reimagined in modern and contemporary literature from the Global South. Focusing on fiction, memoir, poetry, and graphic narrative, the course approaches war writing as a mode of literary inquiry, ethical witnessing, and aesthetic experimentation. Rather than treating war as an exceptional event, the course foregrounds war as a structuring condition that reshapes narrative voice, temporality, genre, and political imagination.
The course places literary texts in dialogue with critical theory on trauma, testimony, colonial and settler-colonial violence, gendered incarceration, and visual culture. Students will engage deeply with close reading, theoretical framing, and comparative analysis, developing advanced critical arguments about how Arab writers narrate catastrophe, survival, and resistance under conditions of ongoing violence.
ENGL 346AC: Issues in Applied Linguistics: Corpus Approaches in Literary and Translation Studies.
Professor Maya Sfeir
Overview
“The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.”― John Sinclair (1991)
“What distinguishes a corpus from a collection of digitised texts is that it is formatted such that the application of the software enables patterning to be observed that would be missed by conventional forms of reading.”—Susan Hunston (2022). The purpose of this course is to introduce students to corpus linguistics as an approach to the study of naturally occurring language, and to explore its applications in literary and translation studies.
Students will examine foundational (quantitative) concepts in corpus linguistics that have influenced linguistics and applied linguistics. In parallel, they will investigate how corpora and corpus methods can be deployed for the analysis of the linguistic and stylistic features of literary language and translation, and how these methods can reveal the connection between patterns and meaning.
Throughout the course, students will become familiar with developments and current trends in the field of corpus stylistics. They will also learn the necessary skills for constructing corpora, and for interpreting corpus data. As students explore the potential of corpus techniques and methods, they will reflect on the theoretical and methodological issues underlying them, and they will apply what they have learned to produce a final paper for the course and communicate their findings in a class presentation. Each week will pair a reading on corpus linguistics with scholarly articles (applications) that engage corpus linguistics to analyze literary language and/or translation in relation to authors, genres, texts, and periods. The course requires no prior knowledge of (corpus) linguistics methods or tools.