In their first year of study, PhD students are required to take four 0.5 credit courses, typically two in each term.

There are two PhD candidacy exams: the Comprehensive Area Exam and the Specialization Area Exam. Both exams are designed to prepare students in areas of specialization for teaching and research.

The Comprehensive Area Exam comprises canonical texts for a teachable area, while the Specialization Area Exam is orientated towards the dissertation and may cover, in-depth, both the canonical and the non-canonical texts necessary for the dissertation research.

The two exams complement and reinforce each other, but occur at separate stages of the program and are graded separately.

Doctoral students are required to meet the language requirement by demonstrating reading proficiency in at least one language other than modern English. (French is the recommended language though students may propose a language other than French if it has direct relevance to the student’s program of study.) The language exam must be completed in Year 3 of the student’s program, and consists of translation and interpretation; it is marked on a pass/fail basis.

Alternatively, students can take a language course at the appropriate level to satisfy this requirement.

A minimum standing of B+ in all prescribed graduate courses and seminars is required. Students are normally expected to maintain an A- average in the program. A student who twice fails the Comprehensive Area Exam, the Specialization Area Exam, or the language exam will normally be required to withdraw from the program.

On April 15 of each year of registration, students are required to complete an annual research progress report detailing the achievements of the previous year and the objectives for the next year. The report must demonstrate satisfactory progress, and must be signed with comments by the advisor and graduate coordinator, and filed with the graduate coordinator and the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies office. Failure to submit a satisfactory report may result in a suspension of the student’s funding or the student being required to withdraw from the program.

At least five terms of full-time study must be devoted to the doctoral program following the completion of a recognized master's degree.

The specialization in gender and genre emerges from the intersection of two broad conceptual areas within literary and film studies. In the wake of feminist theory and criticism, performance theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies, and queer theory, gender is recognized as a crucial factor in the production, circulation, and consumption of literary, filmic, and other cultural discourses. Genres, recognized and defined by particular cultures or communities, serve to shape, identify and make legible social discourses and otherwise amorphous representations. Theorizing and exploring genre in literary, cinematic, historical, performative, psycho-social, and political contexts, the field incorporates a range of inquiries and methodologies that situate the cultural construction of gender and sexuality in relation to the genre in which these constructions appear.

Faculty working in gender and genre studies include: Andrea Austin, Kathryn Carter, Tamas Dobozy, Philippa Gates, Jenny Kerber, Russell Kilbourn, Tanis MacDonald, Mariam Pirbhai, Markus Poetzsch, Katherine Spring, Eleanor Ty, Robin Waugh, Lisa Wood.

Literary and filmic works, visual and oral narratives contribute to one's sense of belonging to an "imagined" community, whether to a domestic family, to a socio-cultural or religious group, or to a broader ideological and political system, such as a nation or empire. In addition to national literatures and films from Britain, Canada, and the United States, the field explores contemporary debates and theoretical developments in post-colonial, global, minority, indigenous, and diasporic studies (including Asian, Caribbean and African). Theoretical, cultural and historical concerns include those of war, imperialism, settlement, slavery, race, hybridity, mobility, globalization, human rights, and gender.

Faculty working in nation, diaspora, culture include: Sandra Annett, Kathryn Carter, Jing Jing Chang, Tamas Dobozy, Madelaine Hron, Tanis MacDonald, Ken Paradis, Mariam Pirbhai, Eleanor Ty.

Textuality is a discursive practice that valorizes text as context, and examines the modes of cultural production and consumption through which ideologies are disseminated, normalized or contested. Films and literary works are best read in awareness of their historical, cultural, and discursive milieus. In literary studies, these range from the Medieval, Early Modern to postmodern periods; in film studies, from early, classical to contemporary films. The field invokes the postmodernist principle that the meanings of a text or a film constitute themselves through reflexive processes of origin, configuration, response, interpretation, and reinterpretation. Scholarly activity in this area can include such varied approaches as aesthetics, translation, adaptation, intertextuality, structural codes and conventions, editing, performance analysis, transmission, circulation, and reception of manuscripts, scripts, and other kinds of texts, source study, stylistics, semantics, semiotics (verbal, visual, aural, gendered); and discourse analysis.

Faculty working in textuality, media, and print studies include: Sandra Annett, Andrea Austin, Maria DiCenzo, Philippa Gates, Madelaine Hron, Russell Kilbourn, Ken Paradis, Markus Poetzsch, Katherine Spring, Robin Waugh, Lisa Wood.

• A master’s degree in English, Cinema, Film Studies or a related field with a minimum A- standing.
• Applications are reviewed by the graduate studies committee, which considers all prior university grades, a statement of research interests, a writing sample and letters of reference.
• Applicants whose native language is not English must provide evidence of proficiency in English prior to admission.
• Contact a prospective adviser prior to submitting your application.
  
  

After you have submitted your OUAC application, paid the non-refundable application fee, and Laurier has received your application, you'll receive an email from gradadmissions@wlu.ca advising you to upload the additional required documentation to Laurier’s Online Registration and Information System (LORIS).

Please note, the application process and the uploading of supplemental documentation, which includes references, typically takes two weeks. To avoid disappointment, please apply early.

An application for admission to our PhD program in English and Film Studies must include:

• The Application Summary, which is generated after you complete your OUAC application (log back in to OUAC to retrieve it).
• Transcripts of all undergraduate and graduate work. Documents must be dated within the past six months.
• A completed statement of intent.
• A resume of your academic and work experience. Include a history of your publication and scholarly paper activity and any other information you feel will interest the admissions committee.
• A sample of your scholarly writing (10-20 pages in length). This may be a chapter of your master's thesis or a paper written for a graduate course.
• Completed reference forms. Three academic references are required. Note: Reference forms are electronically submitted to Laurier by the referee and do not need to be uploaded.

Visit our Graduate Admissions Toolkit for more information about applying.

Proficiency in written and spoken English is essential to graduate studies at Laurier. Applicants whose language of instruction during their previous postsecondary education was not in English must submit evidence of proficiency in English. If applicable, results from accepted testing services must be uploaded to LORIS.

Sandra Annett
Associate Professor
Undergraduate Advisor, Film Studies

• digital and new media
• Japanese popular culture
• world animation
• fan studies

Andrea Austin
Associate Professor

• cybercultures
• narrative theory
• gender theory

Katherine Bell
Associate Professor
Graduate Program Coordinator

• youth culture
• children’s literature and participatory culture
• narrative ethics
• the Canadian bildungsroman
• Atlantic Canadian YA literature

Jing Jing Chang
Associate Professor

• modern China
• Chinese cinemas (Hong Kong)
• postcolonial studies
• Cold War
• gender and sexuality in film

Maria DiCenzo
Professor

• feminist media history
• interwar feminist movement
• 20th-century British theatre

Tamas Dobozy
Professor

• literature and terrorism
• music and utopia
• post-structuralism
• short story

Philippa Gates
Professor

• classical and contemporary Hollywood film
• gender in film
• film history
• crime fiction and film
• Asian Americans in American film
• creative writing

Madelaine Hron
Associate Professor

• human rights
• African postcolonial literature
• immigration
• trauma and healing

Jenny Kerber
Associate Professor
Undergraduate Advisor, English

• Canadian literature
• environmental literature and criticism
• border studies
• Indigenous literature

Russell Kilbourn
Professor
Chair, Department of English and Film Studies

• memory studies
• film theory
• posthumanism
• Italian cinema
• adaptation

Tanis MacDonald
Professor

• Canadian literature
• women's writing
• dystopic literature
• creative non-fiction and memoir

Richard Nemesvari
Professor

• Victorian fiction
• bibliography and textual criticism
• Thomas Hardy
• sensation fiction and melodrama
• genre theory

Mariam Pirbhai
Professor   

• postcolonial and diaspora studies
• Caribbean and South Asian literatures
• Canadian writing, multiculturalism and ethnicity
• creative writing

Markus Poetzsch
Associate Professor

• British Romantic literature
• aesthetics
• pedestrianism
• ecocriticism

Lynn Shakinovsky
Associate Professor

• Victorian literature and culture
• 19th- and 20th-century American literature
• psychoanalysis
• religion and ethics

Katherine Spring
Associate Professor

• film sound and music
• American film history
• theories of narrative and narration
• Hong Kong cinema

Eleanor Ty
Professor

• Asian American and Asian Canadian literature
• graphic novel
• life writing
• 18th-century British fiction
• feminist and gender issues

Robin Waugh
Professor

• Old and Middle English
• Medieval studies
• literary theory

Kathryn Carter
Professor
Dean: Faculty of Liberal Arts (acting)

• 19th-century Canadian literature
• women’s diaries
• life writing

Ian MacRae
Associate Professor

• Canadian poetry
• biophilia and pedagogy
• forms of representation in/of the Canadian Arctic

Kenneth Paradis
Associate Professor

• modern and contemporary American literature
• popular culture
• Evangelical and apocalyptic fiction

Lisa Wood
Associate Professor
Program Coordinator, English

• fiction of the Romantic period
• children’s literature, video games and pop culture
• women’s literature