Financial Aid

Awards for incoming students typically combine one or more fellowship years with several years of teaching to provide at least five years of guaranteed support.

Provost Graduate Fellowships, awarded by the Graduate School, are the most prestigious fellowships available to incoming students, carrying stipends of $30,000 and 24 units of tuition remission.

College Merit Awards provide one or two years of full fellowship support, including stipend and tuition remission.

The Middleton Fellowship, awarded annually to one or two outstanding new students in the Literature and Creative Writing program, offers two years of full fellowship support, including stipend and tuition remission.

Most opportunities for support through teaching are offered in the form of assistant lectureships in the Writing Program of USC College. In return for tuition remission and a stipend, these assistant lecturers manage the writing component of the General Education classes offered by a number of departments, or they serve as tutors in the Writing Center. For more information on the Writing Program, click here.

A smaller number of appointments as assistant lecturers are made annually in the Thematic Option (TO), a university-wide honors curriculum that brings together talented and highly motivated undergraduates from across schools and divisions (it is one of the top-ranked honors programs in the nation). Assistant lecturers in this program receive tuition remission plus a stipend. Responsibilities include running a writing seminar attached to one of the TO classes in the fall and designing and teaching one’s own seminar in the spring. Positions in the TO program are available after applicants have gained experience in the Writing Program and have completed two or more years in the English Ph.D. program. For more information on the Thematic Option Program, click here.

Occasionally teaching assistantships become available through the General Education Program. These TAs take on responsibility for the writing component in a course taught by a faculty member in English or another department.  These assistantships are available once a student has gained experience in the Writing Program and has completed two years or more toward the Ph.D.

Support for dissertation research and writing is available through a number of university-wide competitions, as enumerated in the section on “Fellowships and Prizes,” as well as a number of College Merit Dissertation Fellowships distributed by the department. In addition, the College frequently makes available Final Year and Final Summer Dissertation grants. In recent years, 10-13 students per year have received a dissertation fellowship.