Disciplinary voices: A shifting landscape for english doctoral education in the twenty-first century

Abstract

The origins of this chapter were to move from the social sciences to the humanities to understand from a different disciplinary perspective the shifting, contested nature of the doctorate both within and beyond academe. In this chapter, the views of academics and students in a Department of English are examined as regards the changing nature of the doctorate, within the discipline as well as within institutional and policy contexts. What emerged was a picture of a discipline struggling with whether and how to re-define itself in a time of dramatic changes in popular culture, publishing, institutional drivers, and the job market for English PhD graduates. It becomes obvious, as the chapter unfolds, that some issues brought students and academics together whereas they held divergent and somewhat conflicting views about other issues. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.