The Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University a Master of Arts in English and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Additionally, the English department, working with the School of the Arts and the School of Mass Communications, has inaugurated a new interdisciplinary doctoral program, the PhD in Media, Art, & Text (MATX)

The Master of Arts in English is a 30-semester-hour (ten-course) degree, and students may choose as their area of concentration either Literature or Writing and Rhetoric. Designed for students who wish to continue their education beyond the bachelor’s degree, the program helps students prepare for PhD programs, teaching, and a variety of other positions in the public and private sectors.

The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is a 48-semester-hour (sixteen-course) program of advanced writing workshops and graduate course work. The primary tracks are poetry and fiction, and admission is highly competitive. In addition to the poetry and fiction workshops, there are courses available that focus on writing drama, nonfiction, and screenplays, as well as courses that provide practical experience in editing.

The new Ph.D. In Media, Art, and Text  is a 42 credit hour interdisciplinary Ph.D initiated by The Department of English, the School of the Arts, and the School of Mass Communications. The program is not limited to one department or discipline within the participating units. Rather, it is designed to break down “disciplinary walls” in order to cultivate the research possibilities available to students, allowing them to fashion new intellectual areas for the creation and dissemination of knowledge. While the Ph.D. focuses on new media, it also retains a historical and theoretical dimension by including study in the production, dissemination, and employment of literary texts, art, and other kinds of texts, and in turn how these texts function within specific settings informed by gender, ethnicity, race and other cultural factors. The creation of a Ph.D. that extends its reach to film and New Media, television and advertising, addresses the growing need for the study of virtual and visual texts. Designed for students who enter the program with an M.A., M.S., M.A.E., or M.F.A., the program assumes that students have a strong background in one of the participating disciplines. The coursework is designed both to build on their existing strength, and to compel them to work outside their existing strengths in order to develop new intellectual and creative connections within the multiple media, disciplines, and approaches joined in the program.

Thom Didato, Graduate Programs Coordinator