Graduate Research

Research and publications from our graduate students are rigorous, exciting, elements of the M.A. and Ph.D. experience in the Department of English.

Graduate students in the Department of English produce research at high levels. Provided with comprehensive academic guidance during their time at Carnegie Mellon, our graduate students depart the University with robust bodies of work, research assistantships, conference experience, and oftentimes prestigious awards, all of which directly support their academic or professional paths.

English graduate research and publication opportunities include:

• A live-updated Graduate Opportunities board showcasing a range of RAships, faculty collaborations, fellowship opportunities, and more. 
• External Fellowships and Post-Doc Opportunities
• University-supported Conference Funding. Our graduates often present at a wide array of conferences, for example: ACH (Alliance for Digital Humanities); RSA (Rhetoric Society of America); CSA (Cultural Studies Association).
• Additional research and recognition opportunities for English graduates include:
  -Schaffer Fellowship
  -National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities grants led by our faculty
  • National publications and media coverage featured in, but not limited to:

    Year	Program	Student	Article
    2025	Literary & Cultural Studies	Benjamin Williams	Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the US– Mexico Underground by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez (review)
    2024	Literary & Cultural Studies	Benjamin Williams	"End Detention Now" in Migrantes Valientes: Stories of the South and the North
    	Literary & Cultural Studies	Elizabeth Dieterich	"Theater Then And Now" - Interview with WRCT
    	Literary & Cultural Studies	Elizabeth Dieterich	“Mad Composition!”: Gender, Historiography, and Performance in Royal Shakespeare Company Productions of King John (2012, 2019)
    	Rhetoric	Nicole Tanquary	Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric
    	Rhetoric	Nicole Tanquary	The Case of Cronos: A Study of Familial Resilience and Transnational Political Critique
    	Literary & Cultural Studies	Laura DeLuca	Book Review of Noémie Ndiaye's Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race
    	Rhetoric	Ben Markey	Dense and Disconnected: Analyzing the Sedimented Style of ChatGPT-Generated Text at Scale
    	Rhetoric	Michael Laudenbach	Visualizing formative feedback in statistics writing: An exploratory study of student motivation using DocuScope Write & Audit
    	Literary & Cultural Studies	Catherine Evans	Challenging and Documenting State Violence: A Conversation with Activist Kipp Dawson
    	Literary & Cultural Studies	Catherine Evans	“We Came Together and We Fought”: Kipp Dawson and Resistance to State Violence in US Social Movements since the 1950s
    2023	Literary & Cultural Studies	Benjamin Williams	Documenting Detainment: The Carceral Design of ICE’s National Detainee Handbook
    	Rhetoric	Jimmy Lizama	The Trump Administration's Framing of the MS-13 Gang: Narrowing the Borders of Belonging with Homeland Maternity
    	Rhetoric	Maria Ferrato	Book Review of Michelle C. Smith’s Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women’s Work in the Early Industrial Age
    	Literary & Cultural Studies	Laura DeLuca and Elizabeth Dieterich	Who Rpinted Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio?
    	Rhetoric	Jimmy Lizama	Book Review of Lisa Flores' Deportable and Disposable
    	Literary & Cultural Studies	Benjamin Williams	His Eyes Disappear": (Re)framing the Racial Imagination through Anti-Portraiture in Teju Cole's Blind Spot
    	Literary & Cultural Studies	Benjamin Williams	"Who Is Kin to Me?": Textual and Textural Intimacies in Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh's Human Archipelago
    2022	Rhetoric	Richard Branscomb	Ecologies of Harm: Rhetorics of Violence in the United States
    	Rhetoric	Cody Januszko	The Biopolitics of Public Health Trust: Embodied Risk and the COVID-19 Pandemic
    	Rhetoric	Julie Kidder	Book Review of Lisa Flores' Deportable and Disposable
    	Literary & Cultural Studies	Catherine Evans	Embodied Selves/Disembodied Subjects: Homing the Body in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names
    	Rhetoric	Nicole Tanquary	Tracking the rhetorical legacy of Donald Trump
    	Rhetoric	Nisha Shanmugaraj	Disidentifying from the “model minority”: How Indian American women rearticulate dominant racial rhetorics
    	Rhetoric	Emily DeJeu	The Ethics of Delivering Bad News: Evaluating Impression Management Strategies in Corporate Financial Reporting
    	Rhetoric	Michael Laudenbach	Stylistic variation in email
    	Rhetoric	Hannah Ringler	‘We can’t read it all’: Theorizing a hermeneutics for large-scale data in the humanities with a case study in stylometry
    2021	Literary & Cultural Studies	Avery Wiscomb	Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with Computational Bibliography?
    2019	Literary & Cultural Studies	Baron Glanvill	The culture of dissenting memory : truth commissions in the Global South
    	Rhetoric	Laura McCann	Illness or Identity: Visceral Sense-Making in Pregnancy Loss Narratives

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