The Faculty’s teaching strength includes 6 Professors, 7 Readers and 26 University Lecturers and Assistant Lecturers as well as Research and Teaching Fellows from among college teaching officers.
There are normally about 200 Research Students under supervision in the Faculty, working on a wide range of research topics within English studies (including editing work, textual, linguistic, historical, critical, comparative, and theoretical studies) from the medieval to the modern fields.
Cambridge’s resources for research in English are unusually rich, including, of course, the University Library (over five million volumes), and the collections of rare books and manuscripts in the college libraries. The English Faculty has its own borrowing and reference Library of over 75,000 volumes.
In addition to the courses offered for the M.Phil, and M.St. degrees, seminars for graduate students are usually arranged in the following areas: Resources for Research in various periods, English Historical Linguistics, Medieval Literature, the Renaissance, Restoration to Reform, Eighteenth Century, The Romantic Period, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, American Literature, Drama, Gender and Writing, Literary Theory, Commonwealth and International English Literature. The seminar programme involves a large proportion of senior members of the Faculty in regular meetings and discussion with research students. There are also interdisciplinary seminars. Many lectures and classes are offered by English and other Faculties (for example, Modern and Medieval Languages, Classics, History). Although these are often primarily intended for undergraduates, many will be valuable to individual graduate students in helping them to widen their background of literary studies or to acquire specific knowledge and skills needed in their own research. In general, however, doctoral research students are expected to work on their own, under an assigned Supervisor, in preparing a dissertation.
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