Established in 1961, concurrently with the Graduate Center itself, the Ph.D. Program in English draws on the abundant resources of New York City and the CUNY colleges to provide exceptional and varied academic training in English literature, literary and critical theory, and cultural studies. The Ph.D. Program in English is consortial in nature, combining centrally appointed faculty with faculty appointed from throughout the CUNY system. Many of our faculty are affiliated with Certificate Programs, Institutes, and Interdisciplinary Committees at the Graduate Center, and are active members of various scholarly, creative, and pedagogical communities.

Because of our large size and our ability to draw on faculty from the CUNY colleges, we are able to offer about 50 Ph.D. courses each year in both established and emerging fields. Although we offer a range of courses in every area from medieval to contemporary literatures, we enjoy particular strengths in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical theory; American literature and culture; African American studies; and Composition/Rhetoric.

We encourage our students to follow individualized and interdisciplinary courses of study. Many of our students take courses in other doctoral programs at the Graduate Center or complete one of the Graduate Center's Certificate Programs in Africana Studies, American Studies, Film Studies, Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, or Women's Studies. Our students can also take advantage of the Graduate Center's Interdisciplinary Concentrations in areas such as Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies, Fashion Studies, and Twentieth-Century Studies.

Since the 1990s, the Ph.D. Program in English has received very high rankings in national surveys. In 2000, the National Doctoral Program Survey placed our program first among over 200 graduate English departments across the country; the survey was specifically designed to assess student perceptions of the effectiveness of their doctoral education. In the 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index generated by Academic Analytics, our program ranked tenth (tied with the University of Chicago). Most recently, in 2010, the National Research Council ranked us among the top English doctoral programs in the country, in the company of Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Yale. We received particularly high ratings in the areas of faculty publications, faculty awards, student support activities, and student diversity.