Joint PhD Program in English and Education

Among our strengths, we offer top-flight resources, a supportive and engaging community of scholars, and the flexibility for students to craft a program centered on their individual interests. Our joint association between the Department of English and the Marsal School of Education allows students to gain a particularly strong base in rhetoric and composition theory as well as practical experience in quantitative and qualitative research methods.

Student interests have included rhetorical theory, literacy studies, feminist theory, new media composition, disability studies, queer theory, applied linguistics, English language studies, ethnic studies, creative writing studies, and writing assessment. All students have the opportunity to pursue research projects collaboratively with faculty, including social justice- and activist-oriented research, in addition to individual dissertation research.

All students are guaranteed five years of full funding, and there is additional support for conference travel, research projects, and summer research and writing. To date, we have an outstanding placement record for graduates who have chosen to pursue tenure-track faculty positions in education and English departments in colleges and universities; graduates also assume a broad range of careers in K-12 administration, educational nonprofits, and government-sponsored agencies.

To learn more about the program and how to apply, please visit our Prospective Students pages.

History of the Joint PhD Program in English and Education

by Anne Ruggles Gere, ’74

Professor and Chair 1988-2023

The first dissertation in the “Specialization: English and Education” was completed in August of 1944 by William Harvey Tenney.  A graduate of Oberlin College, Tenney titled his dissertation “An Objective Study of Growth in Four Aspects of Speaking Ability, Based on Sound Motion Pictures.” In this dissertation, he argued for the motion picture as an aid to teaching and, looking at the four features of gross rate of delivery, variation in rate of delivery, eye contact, and gesture, determined that motion pictures could help students improve both audible and visual dimensions of their speaking by studying motion pictures.

Two dissertations in the same “Specialization” appeared the following year. Alice Aileen Traver, a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, wrote a dissertation titled “The Modification Patterns of the Substantive Head Construction in Present-Day American English.” Fred George Walcott, who took all his degrees from the University of Michigan wrote about “Matthew Arnold and the Growth of Democratic Education in England.” In 1946, John Stapleton Nash, who began his education at Livingston College, completed his study of “The Academic Status of the Literature of the American Negro: A Description and Analysis of Curriculum Inclusions and Teaching Practices.”

Dissertations continued to address a wide variety of topics in succeeding years, as students wrote about the structures of independent utterances, modificational patterns in present-day English, the place of English studies in general education, a comparison of question signals in English, Mandarin Chinese, French, and German for teachers of English as a second language, and the teaching of literature in high school. During these early years of the “Specialization,” faculty in the Department of English played an active role in providing professional development for teachers of English in area high schools. 

The correspondence of Warner Rice, who served as chair of the Department of English from 1947 to 1968, includes references to courses offered and a “summer seminar.” In a 1963 letter to his colleague A.K. Stevens, Rice proclaimed, “for my part, I think that we are obligated to send several hundred First-rate English teachers into the Michigan schools every year and to keep them there.”

The appointment of Stephen Dunning to a position in both the School of Education and the Department of English in 1969 gave new visibility to the “Specialization,” and it joined the ranks of Rackham’s interdisciplinary programs as the  Joint PhD Program in English and Education.  Dunning retired in 1988, and the last few years of his tenure as chair, he was joined by Jay Robinson, who served as co-chair. Robinson, in turn, was joined by Anne Ruggles Gere, who served as chair or co-chair from 1987 until 2024. Gere shared leadership with Robinson until 1996.  Leslie Rex joined her as co-chair from 1997 to 2009. Anne Curzan  served as co-chair from 2010 to 2015, and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas became co-chair in 2022, succeeding Gere as chair in 2024.

During its more than 70 years of existence, JPEE has produced over 150 scholars who have gone on to careers in schools of education and departments of English. They have provided leadership in teacher education and writing studies, both in their home institutions and on the national scene. They have contributed to ground-breaking research on topics ranging from representations of race in children’s literature to strategies for teaching writing more effectively. They have been outstanding mentors to their students and have added to the ranks of scholars who contribute to the interrelated fields of English and education.