Arts & Letters.
Arts & Letters
Make It So.
Arts and Letters is a graduate liberal studies program designed with working professionals in mind. Through a diverse set of course offerings, students work on analytical and creative thinking while learning and synthesizing ideas. Coursework allows students to hone their writing and presentation skills. Our faculty mentors work with students to plan their course of study to take advantage of everything the New York City region has to offer. Our students put the humanities to work with internships and other means of experiential learning in the cultural capital of the world.
Now that I've graduated from the Arts & Letters program, I have connected with key members within the scholarly community surrounding my dissertation subject. I owe this to the scholarly transformation I experienced at Drew. I am now an authority of my subject and a part of a global conversation. ”
Master of Letters (33 Credits)
A Step-by-Step Path to Your Degree
The Master of Letters gives you the option of either completing ten courses (30 credits) and a 50–75 page master’s thesis (3 credits) or taking an additional course in lieu of the master’s thesis to complete a total of 11 courses (33 credits).
First Semester (9 Credits)
Second Semester (9 Credits)
Third Semester (9 Credits)
Fourth Semester (6 Credits)
View the Course Catalog for more details.
Doctor of Letters (45 Credits)
A Step-by-Step Path to Your Degree
The program requires the completion of 12 courses, including two required seminars plus preparing and successfully defending a 150–220 page doctoral dissertation.
Required Courses (6 credits)
Electives (18 credits)
Dissertation (9 credits)
Concentration Courses (12 credits)
I imagined it might be difficult for me to break into nonprofit work, but the directors told me that my degree gave me indispensable curiosity, communication skills, research abilities and this willingness to do hard work to help and honor another life. I did not know that working in AIDS advocacy was the work that my Arts and Letters degree was preparing me for, but as it turns out, it has prepared me in unexpected and invaluable ways. ”
Our Program Convener
Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem completed her Ph.D. in English at The Graduate Center of CUNY in 2012. Maureen’s research is on Anglophone writing of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries; she specializes in Irish, Asian, and African American literatures. Her research fields include Irish studies, Partition and Border studies, and Postcolonial Studies; within those areas she frequently looks at questions of reparations, of literary poetics, and of race, gender, and class. Maureen’s first book, The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands appeared from Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. In 2019, a second book-length study titled Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian was brought out by Rowman & Littlefield. Maureen has two books, both from Routledge, Inc., being published in 2020: a third monograph, Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: The Case for Reparations, in September and the edited collection, in which she has two chapters, The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter at the end of the year. Recent articles include “A Consciousness of Streets: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Partition” (Synthesis, 2016) and “Drawing the Border, Queering the Nation: Nation Trouble in Breakfast on Pluto and The Crying Game” (Gender Forum, 2016). The forthcoming piece, “A Poetics of the Fragment: Medbh McGuckian’s Diaries” is to appear in a special issue of Review of Irish Studies in Europe 4.1 in Fall 2020.
Maureen is commencing research this year for a three-volume study of modes of realism in contemporary literatures of partition and a second edited collection titled Imperial Debt, Postcolonial Reparations. She is also working on a grant proposal—“Impassable Partitions | Chthonic Reunification: Cultivating Race-Class Solidarity through (Pedagogical) Modalities of Quiet Revolt”—to fund a summer transfer program for community college students that engages them in a three-part curriculum: agriculture and culinary arts, fine arts, and critical reading, thinking, and writing; this project is informed by a cross-section of criticism and theory from conflict and peace studies, pedagogy, Black studies, and American race and class history. (If she gets the funding, Maureen is hoping to possibly work with Drew folks on this project; let her know if you’re interested in discussing it further: mfadem@drew.edu)
Maureen is thrilled to be joining the Drew community this year as Convener of the Arts and Letters Program in the Casperson School of Graduate Studies. She looks forward to working with faculty and students in the Program and fostering collaborations around campus. As a faculty member, she has particular interests in civic engagement, race and social justice advocacy, and in aligning the humanities with STE(A)M fields. Maureen looks forward to working with the Drew community in building Arts and Letters forward. Being new to Drew, she invites members of the community to reach out for a chat and a coffee: mfadem@drew.edu.