Graduate Placement

The UCI PhD Program in English has placed graduates in a wide range of careers, from tenure-track appointments at research universities to "alt-ac" positions in humanities education and university administration to opportunities in private-sector employment. For our most recent graduating class of 2018, 40% of graduates found tenure-track faculty positions and 30% entered non-tenure-track or alt-ac positions. More broadly, of the students who received their PhDs between 2011 and 2018, 35% are tenure-track faculty and 50% are non-tenure track instructors or in alt-ac positions.

The placement information below offers detail on the positions obtained by our graduates alongside information about their dissertation research.

(Dates refer to year of appointment rather than year of graduation. All assistant professor appointments tenure track unless otherwise noted.)

(All assistant professor appointments tenure track unless otherwise noted.)

2020

Loretta Ramirez
Assistant Professor, California State University, Long Beach
Dissertation: "Textual and Visual Rhetorics of the Generative Wound: A Historical Genealogy from Medieval Iberia to Contemporary Chicanx Self-Representation Strategies and Pedagogies."

2019

Christopher Taekwan Kang
Assistant Professor, College of Wooster
Dissertation: "“Zero Ecology: A Study of British Romantic Poetry”"

Gerald Maa
Editor, The Georgia Review, University of Georgia
Dissertation: "“Thomas De Quincey's Theatric Prose: Theater, Rhetoric, and Literature after the British Enlightenment”"

Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
Assistant Professor, Rice University
Dissertation: "Philippine Anglophone Literature in the Age of Reproductive Labor"

2018

James Funk
Visiting Assistant Professor, Clemson University
Dissertation: "Unity Defective: Figurations of Sovereignty in Early Modern English Literature"

Garrett Bridger Gilmore
Lecturer, University of Alabama
Dissertation: "The White Man's Magic Word: Southern Knowledge and White Racial Melancholy"

Jasmine Lee
Assistant Professor, California State University, San Bernardino
Dissertation: "Appraising Our Investments in Youth: Rhetorical Education in the Age of Neoliberalism"

Jens Lloyd
Visiting Assistant Professor, Drew University
Dissertation: "Campus Life: Rhetorical Education and College Writing amidst an Evolving Geography"

Dana Murphy
LSA Collegiate Postdoc and Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Dissertation: "Divine Quiet: Phillis Wheatley's Gentle Mastery of Meter, Genre, and Address"

Brendan Shapiro
Assistant Professor, College of Southern Nevada
Dissertation: "Closed Minds and Open Systems: Narrative Voice and Institutional Complexity in the Late Modern Novel"

Selamawit Terrefe
Assistant Professor, Tulane University
Dissertation: "Dissociative States: The Metaphysics of Blackness and the Psychic Afterlife of Slavery"

Jessie Wirkus
Performance Consultant, Allen Communications
Dissertation: "The Hand: Grasping Embodiment in British Literature 1690-1746"

2017

Maria Bose
Assistant Professor of English, Clemson University
Dissertation: "Race Writing in the Internet Age"

Anna Finn
Assistant to the Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, UC Riverside
Dissertation: "Changing Times: Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, and the Measure of Modernity"