Career Training and Placement

As described in the “About the Graduate Program” page, USC English is committed not just to instructing students, but to providing them with the skills, knowledge, and experience required to succeed in the profession. 

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

Students have the opportunity to progress through a series of 2- and 4-credit seminars that focus on aspects of professionalization from the beginning to end of the Ph.D. program. Upon enrolling in the fall semester, all students are required take English 501: Introduction to Graduate Study: Critical Methods and Practice I, a team-taught course designed to expose students in both the literature and the creative writing tracks to critical methodologies, recent theories, and debates in the field, as well as introduce them to issues of professional development that reach from publication to conferences. An advanced elective version of this course, English 601, explores specific issues in methodology and practice. Designed to prompt students to consider the academic choices and future for which their project is slotting them, English 700: Theories and Practices of Professional Development I, focuses on the development of the dissertation prospectus and the construction of one’s field areas in preparation for the qualifying examination process.

JOB PLACEMENT

Most important, however, in the student’s career training is the placement seminar, English 701: Theories and Practices of Professional Development II, offered every fall semester by the placement director (a faculty member who is invested in graduate education and works closely with the graduate director). English 701 rigorously trains the student in the sets of skills and materials needed to succeed in the competitive job market. This training is completed in December by practice interviews and succeeded in the spring semester by practice job talks and teaching practicums. Without exception, our students rave about this part of their training, which includes many hours of one-on-one instruction with the placement director as well as in-class training that involves most members of the faculty. The results are clear in the greatly increased number of MLA interviews, campus fly-back visits, and tenure-track placements our Ph.D. students have garnered in the last four years. Travel to the annual MLA meeting for job interviews is funded by the department up to a set amount.

PUBLICATION WORKSHOPS

Another aspect of USC English that enhances our students’ career possibilities are the workshops we hold on publication. Over the past five years we have invited a number of prominent scholars and editors to hold day-long workshops with our students geared to transforming their essays into publishable articles, as well as their dissertations into books. In recent years our visiting experts have included Nancy Armstrong (Brown University, editor of Novel, editorial board of PMLA), Catherine Gallagher (UC Berkeley and editor of Representations), LeAnn Fields (editor of University of Michigan Press), Donald Pease (Dartmouth College), and Helen Tartar (editor at Stanford UP). These seminars have resulted in publications as well as conference paper acceptances.

STUDENT-RUN NATIONAL CONFERENCE

The department also encourages graduate students to participate in professional conferences in two ways. First, it funds travel to conferences for all students presenting papers or for job interviews up to a set amount. Second, it funds an annual conference hosted by the Association of English Graduate Students (AEGS), where students learn invaluable skills in choosing a conference topic, planning and organizing panels and events, inviting keynote speakers, and facilitating intellectual exchange. This popular event caps the spring semester of every year.  Recent topics have included:

2006:  “Trans--: Negotiations and Resistance”
2005:  “Parties/Shared Space”
2004:  “The Judgment of Beauty: Beauty's Role in Contemporary Criticism”
2003:   “Contamination: Sites of Contagion, Transgression and Transformation”
2002:   “Monster and Critic: Transactions Among Arts, Critique, Culture(s)”
2001:   “Room For Play: Theater, Drama, Performance”

Recent Job Placement

2008-2009:

Katherine Karlin, Assistant Professor of English (tenure track)                           
Kansas State University                                
Dissertation: Alewives and Factory Girls: Literary Representations of Working Women; creative project, Freedom of Informattion (novel)

Jennifer Malia, Lecturer (non-tenure track)                        
Writing Studies Department, American University, United Arab Emirates            
Dissertation: Romancing the Bomb: Gothic Terror and Terrorism in Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century

Amy Schroeder, Assistant Professor  
Dogus University                                    
Dissertation: Typewriters and Cooking Smells: The Associated Sensibilities of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham; creative project, The Sleep Hotel (poetry collection)

Jeffrey M. Solomon, Visiting Assistant Professor (non-tenure track)  
St. Olaf College, Minnesota                                      
Dissertation: Fabulous Potency: Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote, Authorial Personae, and Homosexual Identity from the Wilde Trials to Stonewall

Kathryn M. Strong, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                           
The Citadell, The Military College of South Carolina                                  
Dissertation:  Dress and Deception: Women's Dress and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel  

2007-2008:

William (Memo) Arce, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                           
University of Texas-Arlington                                  
Dissertation: A Nation in Uniform: Chicano/ Latino War Literature and the Construction of Nation 1951 – 1976

Michael Blackie, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                        
Hiram College Literature and Medicine Program            
Dissertation: Rest Cures: The Narrative Life of a Medical Practice

Elizabeth Binggeli, 2-year Postdoc in Film and Literature 
University of Chicago                                    
Dissertation: 'Obviously not for the Screen:' Race, Hollywood Story Searches, and the Revenge of Unfilmable Narrative

Jennifer Conary, Assistant Professor (tenure track)  
De Paul University                                      
Dissertation: Beautiful Lost Causes: Quixotic Reform and the Victorian Novel

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Assistant Professor (tenure track) 
St. Olaf's College                                         
Dissertation:  critical project: Articulate Absences: Notebooks from a Missing Person; creative project: Paper Pavilion (poetry collection)

Unhae Langis, Assistant Professor (tenure track)             
Slippery Rock State College                          
Dissertation: Disciplined Passion: Virtuous Moderation in Shakespearean Drama

Frank Mabee, Assistant professor (tenure track)          
Fitchburg State                                          
Dissertation: The Pastured Sea: Maritime Radicalism and British Romanticism

Marci McMahon, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                          
University of Texas, Pan American                           
Dissertation: Domestic Negotiations: Chicana Domesticity as a Critical Discourse of U.S. Literature and Culture

James Penner, Assistant Professor (tenure-track)                      
English Department of the College of General Studies, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras (San Juan)                           
Dissertation: Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture from the Depression to the Sexual Revolution

Hande Tekdemir, Assistant Professor (tenure track)
Bosphorus University, Istanbul
Dissertation: Collective Melacholy: Istanbul at the Crossroads History, Space and Memory

2005-2007:

William (Memo) Arce, postdoctoral fellowship            
Bowdoin College   
Dissertation: A Nation in Uniform: Chicano/ Latino War Literature and the Construction of Nation 1951 – 1976

Ava Chin, Assistant Professor (tenure track)      
SUNY-Staten Island                                    
Dissertation: critical project: Writing the Incomprehensible: Representations of 9/11 in Contemporary Literature; creative project, Daughter (novel)

Shauna L. Eddy-Sanders, (part-time faculty)                       
Brigham Young University                               
Dissertation: Signing Identity and Rethinking U.S. Poetry:  Acts of   Translating American Sign Language, African American, and Chicano Poetry and the Language of Silence 

Kevin Laam, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                          
Oakland University                       
Dissertation: Borrowed Heaven: Early Modern Devotion and the Art of Happiness

Sun Hee Theresa Lee, Visiting Assistant Professor              
Carleton College                                       
Dissertation: Self-Reflexivity and Minority Politics in Contemporary American Literature and Performance

Michael Miklos, Ralph Bunche Professor, English    
Los Angeles City College   
Dissertation: Undermining Common Sense: Racial Legislation, Comedy, and the Family           

Samuel Park, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                                    
Columbia College in Chicago                            
Dissertation: Theatrical Metaphors and the Performance of Race in Asian American Drama

James Penner, Visiting Assistant Professor            
Dickinson College
Dissertation: Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity and American Literary Culture from the Depression to the Sexual Revolution

Jennifer Stoever, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                    
SUNY-Binghamton                
Dissertation: Soundscapes of Race: African American Literature and the Cultural Politics of Listening

Mary Elizabeth Tegan, Assistant Professor (tenure track)         
Xavier College, Chicago                                 
Dissertation: Vanity’s Heirs: Feminist Readers’ Reflections Within the Mirror of Romance, 1788-1876

2004-2005:

Chris Abani, Associate Professor           
University of California, Riverside                              
Dissertation: critical project: The Myth of Fingerprints: Signifying as Displacement in Derek Walcott’s “Omeros”; creative project: Daphne’s Lot (novel)

Vidhu Aggarwal, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                           
Rollins College                                           
Dissertation: Undecidable Cases: Investigations into Lyric Modes and Affective Processes

Elizabeth Bleicher, Assistant Professor (tenure track)              
Ithaca College       
Dissertation: ’Whom Do You Take me For?’: Narrative Self-fashioning and Confidence in Victorian Fiction

Jitender Gill,              
University of New Delhi                                        
Dissertation: Servants of the Raj: The Colonial and his Fictions, 1770 to 1930

Jinny Huh, Assistant Professor (tenure track) 
University of Vermont and postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA 
Dissertation: The Arresting Eye: Race and the Detection of Deception

Frank Mabee, Visiting Assistant Professor                   
University of Tennessee                              
Dissertation: The Pastured Sea: Maritime Radicalism and British Romanticism

Cynthia Sarver, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                 
SUNY-Cortland                                             
Dissertation: Seeing in the Dark: Race, Representation, and the Ethics of Visuality in Literary Modernism

Onita Vaz, Assistant Professor (tenure-track)                
Davidson College                                        
Dissertation: Perpetual Self-Duplication: Coleridge’s Practice of Revision

2002-2004:

John Bruns, Assistant Professor (tenure-track)                                        
College of Charleston                
Dissertation: Loopholes: Reading Comically

Sumangala Bhattacharya, Assistant professor                         
Pitzer College                                           
Dissertation: Victorian Hunger

Joseph Carrithers, Associate Professor     
Fullerton College                                                               
Dissertation: On the Margins of Memory: Narrating the Past in the Contemporary Multicultural Novel

Arnab Chakladar, Assistant professor (tenure track)                
University of Colorado at Boulder                        
Dissertation: At Home in the World: Indian Literature in the Postcolonial Academy

Molly Engelhardt, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                    
Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi                      
Dissertation: Dancing out of Line: Ballrooms, Ballets, and Victorian Bodies in Motion

Desmond Harding, Assistant Professor (tenure track)               
Central Michigan University                              
Dissertation: Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism (pb. Routledge, 2003)

Deborah Levitt, Assistant Professor (tenure track)   
Eugene Language College, The New School for Liberal Arts                      
Dissertation: title not available

Edward Schantz, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                  
McGill University                                            
Dissertation: Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature

Sean Zwagerman, Assistant Professor (tenure track)              
Simon Fraser University                            
Dissertation: At Wit’s End: The Rhetoric of Humor and the Ends of Talk

1998-2002:

Reginald L. Flood, Assistant Professor (tenure track)                           
Eastern Connecticut State University                 
Dissertation: White Slaves, Black Servants

Dean Franco, Associate Professor           
Wake Forest University       
Dissertation: title not available

Valerie A. Karno, Associate Professor       
University of Rhode Island   
Dissertation: Legal Topographies

Kristen Parkinson, Associate Professor    
Hiram College         
Dissertation: Home Work: Women, Accomplishments, and Victorian Contructions of Class

Michael Reynolds, Assistant Professor       
Hamline College                                                     
Dissertation: title not available

Rosemary Weatherston, Associate Professor     
University of Detroit Mercy             
Dissertation: Turning the Informant: The Making of Difference in Twentieth Century American Literature and Culture