Most Universities in the United States love exchange students. It's part of their unreasonable obsession with Diversity (*waves hands for effect*) If you're an international transfer student, you pretty much can get seeded.

It got so bad a couple years ago that the University of Michigan was sued because their application process gave African-American students an automatic 50 points on their application (the essay was worth 2 to 10 points I believe).

Anyhow, the first step I'd recommend for looking at a college in the US is to go to US News and World Report. They are largely an unrivaled ranking system. We'll skip some steps and go with this, the best Liberal Arts Colleges:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/col...rtco_brief.php

Compare some of these on the list with two really important things, student to faculty ratio, so you don't get enormous class sizes (something you really don't want in a Lit class) and secondly, tuition. There's a lot of really good Private Universities in the States, but they'll kill you on cost. Most universities in the States have gotten pretty expensive.

Once you've found a couple you like, make absolutely sure that transfer students (or international transfer students) get guaranteed housing. If they don't offer it, the college had better be in a large city like Boston or Philadelphia.

After you've really narrowed it down, take a look at what their English Department offers as classes. If they're just the basic offerings of "British Lit after 1880", "American Lit up to 1870", and "Chaucer", don't bother. All of them have those. Granted some won't always show the really interesting special topics classes, but my college recently had a specially offered Literature Course solely on Hell in Literature. My RA last year told me she was taking it this coming semester, and was really enthused about it. I took a class on Third World Literature focussed on India, and it was an amazing class. That one does seem to be offered regularly.

Well, that's my quick guide to picking a college in the United States by major. Student to Faculty Ratio is probably more important that anything. If the class is too big ( > 40) , the professor won't bother starting up a discussion in class.