PhD Placements

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The six year, fully-funded PhD in English prepares students for academic teaching and research.  Flexible and immersive, with students admitted on a 1:1 faculty-to student-ratio, the program provides personally-tailored mentoring and development for research and pedagogical skills. In addition to a highly successful record for academic job placement, the department excels at placing interested students in alternative-academic and industry career paths.

Dr. RJ Boutelle ’16

A graduate of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and a former Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow, RJ Boutelle is associate of English and an affiliate faculty in Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He has previously held tenure-track faculty appointments at Florida Atlantic University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His writings have appeared in Atlantic Studies, MELUS, American Literature, and the collection Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800s–1920, ed. Evelyn O’Callaghan and Timothy Watson (Cambridge UP, 2021). His book, The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny, is available from the University of North Caroliina Press. He is focused on a number of collaborative and editorial projects engaging the works of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, William Still, and Charles Chesnutt.

Dr. Sarah Hagaman ’25

Sarah Hagaman is an Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics in the School of Medicine and Dentistry. Her research traces the rise of parodic, irreverent, and ironic disclosures of mental illness, which model what she calls the “postconfessional mode.” More broadly, Sarah’s work argues for and models the application of literature to questions about medicine and public policy.

Dr. Anne Margaret Castro ’16

A native Texan and an alumna of the University of Texas at Austin, Anne Margaret Castro (PhD 2016) is Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University. Prior to that, she spent two years at the University of Oxford as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Literature of the Black Americas. Castro’s research explores how authors and artists represent the interactions between abstract belief and material embodiment in the drama and literatures of the America. Her book, The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature, is available from the University of Virginia Press in their New World Series. Her second book project is tentatively entitled Staging Movements: Afro-Diasporic Literatures of Containment.

Dr. Lucy Mensah ’16

Lucy Mensah is Assistant Professor of Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago’s School of Art & Art History. Prior to this, she was an assistant curator of contemporary art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Before the DIA, Mensah was an art history fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she assisted in acquisition research and collection management. While at the Met, she developed a research project examining the incorporation of West African textile design in Afrofuturist art and fashion. 

Kelsey Rall, ’25

Dr. Kelsey Rall is Assistant Professor of English at Lamar University. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Irish literature from the University College Cork in Ireland, as well as an M.A. and a PhD in English literature from Vanderbilt University. At Lamar, she teaches primarily pre-1900 American literature and writing-intensive courses. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century global Anglophone literature; her current project examines the relationship between single women characters and the systems of community that structure their textual worlds.

Dr. Derrick Spires ’12

​Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. He specializes in early Black print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His scholarship and teaching are invested in fleshing out as rich and full an account of earlier African American literature and Black aesthetic sensibilities as possible from the tragicomic to the mundane. He committed to recovering the rich imaginative worlds African-descended people generated through print and how imagining enabled Black folk to make material change. His book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press) won the Modern Language Association Prize for First Book and the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize.

Dr. Nafissa Thompson-Spires ’06

A prize-winning fiction writer, Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the Richards Family Assistant Professor of English at Cornell, where she specializes in fiction writing and television studies. Prior to moving to Cornell in 2019, she was an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Her debut book of short stories, Heads of the Colored People (Simon and Schuster, 2018) won the PEN Open Book Award in 2019, an Audie Award for Short Stories/Collections, and was a 2018 finalist for the prestigious Kirkus Prize. Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author, it was also longlisted for the National Book Award.

Placement Data

The data below reflects job placement for 84 PhD graduates since 2008.