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Home > Graduate Studies > Admissions : Amenities

Amenities

English Graduate Student Computer Lab

Our computer room (currently in Lind Hall 306) is filled with Macintosh and Windows machines and a couple of high resolution printers (printing free of charge). All students get Internet access and an email account when they register.

The University of Minnesota Libraries

The University of Minnesota Libraries represent one of Minnesota’s greatest intellectual and capital assets. The 16th largest research library in North America, the Libraries also subscribe to over 20,000 full text online journals, searchable through the article indexes listed on the home page. In addition, the Libraries own several special collections of interest to students of British and American literature.

University-wide Computer Instruction

Excellent short courses are available throughout the year from the University Technology Training Center, ranging from beginning lessons on word processing and Excel to more information than a healthy person wants to know about an operating system. For the past few years, UTTC has offered a free course for teaching assistants to learn more than the basics about web site design and implementation.

Conference Support

The department has a small budget to pay part of the travel expenses for M.F.A. and Ph.D. students who are giving papers at academic conferences, reading their creative writing, or going for a job interview.

Dossier Service and MLA Job Information List

The Graduate Studies office maintains your dossier—letters of recommendation, list of courses, and your curriculum vitae. The office also subscribes to the jobs list.

Lectures, Readings, Conferences

The Department of English is host to a steady flow of speakers, readers, and writers—usually two to three a month during the academic year.

The Edelstein-Keller Endowment allows the Creative Writing program to sponsor writers in residence for a few days to a full term. Recent E-K writers: Melissa Fay Greene, Edward P. Jones, Tracy Kidder, Lorrie Moore, Ben Marcus, Claudia Rankine. For more than 50 years, the Department's annual Joseph Warren Beach Lecture has brought to campus many of the great scholars and writers of literature in English, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Mary McCarthy, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling. The Esther Freier Endowed Lectures host two prize-winning writers every academic year. Recent Freier visitors: A. S. Byatt, E. L. Doctorow, Rita Dove, Bharati Mukherjee, and Paul Muldoon. Graduate students and faculty of the department have also organized specialized conferences on topics such as Fantasy Literature, Travel Writing, and Feminist Rhetorics.

And these are only the lectures, readings, and conferences in the English department. Our colleagues in the language departments, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, history, philosophy, environmental sciences, art, theater, and music contribute to an overwhelmingly rich intellectual life at the University.