I'll explain.
I arrived at UNH in the fall of 2006, declared as an English major. I accidentally took a class called The Secret Lives of Words (yes, really) in the second semester of my freshman year of college. And, as college tends to do, this class changed my life - it changed how I thought about language and words and what this means for our understanding of literature. I quickly added linguistics as a second major. Already jaded with writing papers on symbolism, I spent the next three years trying to convince the English department that the study of literature requires an application of linguistic theory before we can even begin to talk about symbolism. This was not always well-received.
During the summer between my junior and senior year, I was working closely with one of my professors on a project about Contemporary English morphology. I mentioned that I was thinking about graduate school. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into linguistics or literature, but I was fairly certain that I did not want to have to re-validate my entire approach to literature to an entirely new school. My professor told me to consider some literary linguistics programs.
I hopped on LinguistList.org, which is a wonderful resource if you're a linguistics student, and quickly found that there was pretty much nothing out there that I was interested in. Many of the MA programs in Literature and Linguistics were, essentially, what I was getting my BA in. I could get my MA in English linguistics, but between my research project/senior thesis and the UNH linguistics department's focus, I was essentially already doing that as an undergraduate.
I did some more searching through Google and found a number of literary linguistics programs for languages like French, German, and Spanish. This was fine - the idea was that you would be able to teach the literature of these languages - except for the fact that I do not speak any of these languages fluently, if at all. So much for that.
I eventually found three schools in the United Kingdom and four schools in Nigeria that offered graduate degrees in English-language literary linguistics. Clearly it is a very small field. I knew that going to graduate school would require some relocation, but I had been thinking about the Midwest or West Coast, not another country. Though I'm sure Africa is a lovely place, I don't think it would be the best idea for me to study there. I applied to the three schools in the UK. Strathclyde's program was the best fit for me; I accepted their offer.
In September 2010 I join the University of Strathclyde's English department as a postgraduate studentCurrently, I am spending the 2010-2011 academic year working on my Master's of Research degree.
Questions? Comments? Queries? Please feel free to e-mail me.
