MA in English Language & Literatures
Whether your passion lies in teaching, writing, research, or publishing, you’ll build a strong career foundation with the English Language and Literatures Program at Mills. Your studies will culminate with a scholarly research project that sparks your passion.
About the Program
The master of arts (MA) in English language and literatures is designed to develop your critical writing and scholarly research skills essential to a variety of professional paths. Our alumnae go on to study in top-tier PhD programs, and many have found positions as full-time professors at both community colleges and four-year institutions. Others teach high school or have embarked on promising careers in critical and technical writing, publishing, and editing.
While at Mills, you’ll have the opportunity to study with our faculty of renowned scholars and writers, and to explore both historical traditions and contemporary literatures in a wide range of classes. You’ll work closely and collaboratively with faculty to choose a course of study and develop a final MA research project that is a sustained piece of scholarly research. Our students regularly attend and present at nationally recognized literary conferences, and many of our alumnae publish articles based on the work they completed at Mills.
Mills also offers a wide range of teaching and professional development opportunities for students in our English graduate programs. Our MA candidates are active teachers and tutors at Mills and in the greater San Francisco Bay Area community, assisting in undergraduate classrooms and working at local high schools and colleges.
You’ll have opportunities to engage with fellow students and a vibrant literary community through numerous activities on and off campus. We encourage students to interact with the local literary network which encompasses UC Berkeley, Stanford, and San Francisco State for access to an even wider range of lectures and research libraries. Cross-registration at UC Berkeley and many other local institutions is available, as is access to courses across the Mills liberal arts curriculum.
We offer both two-year and three-year course of study options. Degree requirements are exactly the same whether you choose to earn the MA in two years or three; your study is simply completed over a different time frame.
Both need-based scholarships and partial-tuition graduate assistantships are available for graduate English students. We also offer a small number of competitive full-tuition fellowships to applicants entering the MFA and MA programs. Learn more about our special funding opportunities for graduate English students.