Prospective applicants to the Cornell Ph.D. program in English occasionally write me to ask about the “type of student Cornell is looking for.” …

A glance at the titles of dissertations completed in the past five years suggests why it’s a difficult question to answer. Are we looking for the type of student who is interested in “George Eliot and the Victorian Discourses of Gender and Historiography” (Rohan Maitzen, now teaching at Dalhousie University) or in “Gender Magic: Desire, Romance, and the Feminine in Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight” (Geraldine Heng, University of Texas/Austin)… .

Fascinating work has also been produced by … students who bring their training as readers and interpreters of literature to the study of visual media in dissertations such as “Rearranging the Furniture: The Apparatus of Subjectivity in 1950s Cinema” (Sabrina Barton, University of Texas at Austin) or &# ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase