In fall, 2006, the English department, working in conjunction with the School of the Arts and the School of Mass Communications, inaugurated a new interdisciplinary doctoral program, the PhD in Media, Art, & Text (MATX). The program officially began in the fall of 2007 with 12 students (7 of them fully funded), each already coming to the program with graduate degrees in English, creative writing, film, photography, printmaking, and broadcasting.

The 2007-2008 academic year welcomes 11 additional PhD students (9 fully funded) chosen from an even greater and growing pool of qualified applicants. The MATX PhD program focuses on new media while also retaining both an historical and a theoretical dimension by encouraging the reassessment of the production, dissemination, and employment of "traditional" literary texts, works of art, and other kinds of texts. In turn, students study how these texts function within specific settings informed by gender, ethnicity, race and other cultural factors. The course of study in the PhD also extends its reach to film and new media, television and advertising, addressing the growing need for the study of virtual and visual texts. The MATX PhD program is not limited to one department or discipline within the participating units. Rather, it breaks 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.

For more information, see the MATX website.