Requirements
Ph.D. Requirements
Coursework: The basic requirement for the doctoral degree is 72 graduate credits, the bulk of which are made up by taking ten departmental seminars. Candidates must also satisfy a Minor Field requirement, broadly defined as an area of knowledge or intellectual discipline other than English or American literature. The range of possibilities is vast, the only requirement being that the Minor Field be cogent and have some defensible relation to the student's Ph.D. dissertation.
Examination: Candidates for the Ph.D. also take a Ph.D. oral qualifying examination that is basically of their own design. The exam consists of three fields: (a) Author, (b) Historical Period, and (c) Genre or Critical Methodology. The student constructs each examination list with a faculty committee member who specializes in that area, and all three lists are reviewed for approval by the Director of Graduate Studies.
Dissertation: The degree is completed through a book-length work of original scholarship or criticism. The student's dissertation is supervised and then read by three faculty members. Upon the completion of the dissertation, the student then participates in a dissertation defense with her/his committee members.
Masters Requirements
The Masters Program is designed to satisfy the needs of a variety of students, including those wishing to pursue the M.A. as a terminal degree and those wishing to gain preliminary exposure to graduate level work before deciding whether or not to apply to doctoral programs. M.A. students have equal access to all seminars, but if they wish must reapply to our Ph.D. program, where they have only competitive, not preferential, access. The full degree program consists of 30 credits distributed as 8 seminars and an M.A. examination, thesis or project. This program offers no financial assistance.
Course Work: Masters candidates typically take 8 seminars, including English 501: Introduction to Scholarly Methods.
Examination or Thesis: Masters students complete their degrees by taking a two-field oral examination similar in design to the Ph.D. examination but of reduced length, by completing a critical and/ or scholarly thesis of modest length (c. 60-80 pages) that is then read and approved by their Thesis Director and one other faculty member, or by doing a combination of a single-field exam together with a suitable project of approximately 30 pages.
