About Our Program

USC is one of a very small group of institutions in America to offer a combined Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature. Students admitted to this program take a series of writing workshops taught by our internationally renowned creative writing faculty and graduate literature seminars with other students in the literature track.

The Ph.D. program provides dual emphasis in literature and creative writing, culminating in the dissertation that combines critical analysis with creative originality. Doctoral candidates not only read and write texts as finished products of scholarship in researching their creative work’s literary and historical milieu, but also consider the text as writers create it, then compose texts as writers, a process that goes to the source of the study of literature and of literature itself. This integration of literature and creative writing is reflected in the structure of the dissertation, which introduces the creative work within a context of critical inquiry, bringing together the examination and embodiment of the literary act, a new model of scholarship and creative innovation.