Professor Cristanne Miller.

Students engage in small group discussion with Professor Cristanne Miller.

Welcome to the Department of English

With small, interactive classes from award-winning faculty, we offer undergraduates a liberal arts experience at a large, public, research university. If you are passionate about literature, poetry, popular culture, film, or the craft of writing, come see what the English Department has to offer. We offer certificates in journalism and creative writing, a minor in global film, and many opportunities to experience literature in the community through Exhibit X, Poetics Plus, the Buffalo Film Seminars, the Creely Lectures, and the BABEL Reading Series.   

Our graduate program is one of the most flexible and innovative in the country. We take particular pride in our Poetics Program, our Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, and our working groups in everything from British modernism to ecocriticism. Our award-winning faculty is well-known nationally and internationally, and our graduates hold positions at a wide range of universities, colleges, publishers, and non-profit organizations.

Studying English @ UB

The English major offers students a liberal arts experience at a large, public university. We have a 4:1 ratio of majors to faculty, which lets us keep our classes small, interactive, and focused on students.

Our faculty teach approximately 80% of majors classes and 90% of 300 and 400 level courses, offering a great diversity of classes in traditional fields of English and American literature as well as in world literature, film, journalism, and creative writing. Students also have the opportunity to work with faculty on original research projects. Our major is rigorous, yet flexible, in its requirements.

Open, Flexible, and Innovative Graduate Programs

Our PhD and MA Programs are among the most open, flexible, and innovative in the country. Students pick and choose from a wide range of seminars in such fields as American and British literature, film, psychoanalysis, popular culture, cultural studies, poetics, and critical theory. We value this variety as essential to a course of graduate study that engages equally with tradition and with change, whether it be in terms of developments in intellectual inquiry or changes taking place in the academy as a whole. Our graduate students become innovative scholars and teachers of literature and culture.

Accomplished and Recognized

National and International Undergraduate and Graduate Student Awards

  • Associated Collegiate Press Award
  • “Best Books” for 2011, Publishers Weekly
  • Bill Fisher Award for Best First Book
  • 3 Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowships at Georgia Tech University (in five years)
  • Corporation of Yaddo Artist Residency and Travel Grant
  • Edna Steeves Prize
  • Elizabeth George Foundation Individual Artist Grant
  • Ford Foundation Fellowship
  • Fritz Senn Scholarship from the James Joyce Foundation
  • 6 Fulbright Fellowships (between 2011 and 2013)
  • International Association for Study of Irish Literatures Scholarship
  • International James Joyce Association scholarship
  • Irish Seminar Fellowship
  • John Anson Kittredge Education Fund Individual Artist Grant
  • Keough-Naughton Institute Fellowship
  • NEMLA Travel Grant and Summer Fellowship
  • New York College English Association Conference Graduate Student Prize
  • Pushcart Prize
  • Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry
  • Santa Fe Art Institute Artist Residency and Fellowship Award
  • T.S. Eliot Prize
  • Tupelo Press 2011 First/Second Book Award finalist
  • United Nations Year of Planet Earth Writing Prize
  • Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency, Full Fellowship Award, and Writer’s Grant
  • Virginia Center for the Arts Residential Fellowship
  • Winner of 2011 Outriders Poetry Project
  • Winner of James Joyce Broadsheet Graduate Essay Competition 2010

SUNY/UB Undergraduate and Graduate Awards since 2007

  • 3 Academy of American Poets Prizes
  • APPLE Award from Committee for Excellence in Learning and Teaching
  • Arthur A Schomberg Fellowship
  • Arthur O. Eve Educational Opportunity Program Award
  • 2 Bob Young Dissertation Fellowship in Jewish Studies
  • Canadian-American Studies Research Grant
  • 7 CAS Dissertation Fellowships (discontinued 2008-2012)
  • 7 CAS Outstanding Senior Awards
  • 5 Digital Humanities Initiative at Buffalo Grants (discontinued 2011)
  • 2 Friends of Dan Liberthson Poetry Prizes
  • 2 Friends of the University Libraries Undergraduate Poetry Prizes
  • 2 Gender Institute Dissertation Fellowships
  • 12 Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching Awards
  • 2 Humanities Institute Advanced PhD/Dissertation Fellowships
  • Humanities Institute Summer Research Grant
  • Mark Diamond Research Grant
  • Phi Beta Kappa Hildegarde F. Shinners Memorial Prize
  • 13 SUNY Chancellor’s Awards for Student Excellence