Commencing Study

The Iowa doctoral program depends on individual initiative, careful choice, and creativity. With the exception of the Introduction to Graduate Study course for M.A. and Ph.D students, no specific course or sequence of courses is required. Instead, all students are encouraged to design a program that combines enough breadth to ensure responsible judgment with enough focus to make scholarly contributions to your field possible or even likely before the completion of the degree. In planning your course of study, it is important to remember that in the past decade economic constraints have led many colleges and universities to seek broadly trained, critically informed job candidates, candidates prepared to teach and publish in amply defined fields of study. The Iowa Ph.D program's distribution, seminar, and foreign language requirements are intended to equip you for the current academic job market.

In an initial conference with the Director of Graduate Studies, you will fill out a "Course Record" form which identifies the historical and critical areas in which you have completed academic work, as well as your preparation for foreign languages and any previous graduate courses that will transfer. If you haven't already done so in undergraduate studies or in graduate study completed elsewhere, you will be encouraged to sample advanced course work in most historical areas, in criticism, and in theory before committing to a specific field of concentration. The goals of this initial conference are three: to identify areas in which substantial course work has been completed and areas which still need exploration, to review your preparation in foreign languages, and to make tentative long-term plans in view of your specific professional goals. This initial conference should also prepare the Director of Graduate Studies to be of help to you through your first semesters at Iowa.

Much of the success of the Ph.D. program at Iowa derives from interactions with faculty members in the student's field of concentration. When you are ready to identify one or another area as your field of concentration, it will be time to ask a faculty member in that area to serve as your interim adviser. This adviser will help you plan the rest of your course work, prepare for Admission to Candidacy, and begin preparation for your Comprehensive Examination. Although the timing varies, most students are ready to ask a faculty member to serve as their interim adviser sometime between the end of the second semester and the middle of the fourth semester of doctoral study. Availability of individual faculty members depends on research interests, teaching schedules, and current advising load, but you are most likely to find a successful match with a professor from whom you have taken at least one course. After a faculty member has agreed to serve as your adviser, you should register this commitment with the Program Assistant. Because academic interests and career goals shift for students and faculty alike, this commitment is an "interim" one: the faculty member who helps you make the professional choices that shape the middle years of doctoral study may or may not continue to guide you through your dissertation. The "Course Record" form in your file will help you make course choices in relation to your professional objectives and will help the Director of Graduate Studies understand your progress toward the degree. As you approach the Comprehensive Examination, introductory graduate survey courses will yield to more advanced work in your field of concentration, and, in at least three cases, to seminars.

Each student needs to create a coherent individual plan of study. There is no department blueprint. While students who have had broad undergraduate and/or M.A. training in the literatures of various periods and in criticism and theory will be ready to begin to develop their field of concentration early, students who have had little training in literature and literary theory should sample a broad selection of courses before they commit to a particular field of concentration. In the first year of course work, students are advised to select courses both to fill gaps in their training and to develop their major interests.

200-level (readings courses): Courses at this level provide coverage of a period, movement, theme, foundational figure, or other component of a broad-based understanding of the discipline. Some offerings satisfy historical distribution requirements; others introduce students to a related body of primary texts, criticism, and/or theory serving as groundwork for more specialized study at the 400-level. Writing assignments are varied, limited in scope (adding up to about 3000-5000 words), and may include types of professional performance such as annotated bibliographies, short conference papers, book reviews, project proposals, etc. It is impossible to standardize the quantity of reading; however, both faculty and students are urged to consult a range of normative syllabi on file in the Graduate Secretary's office. 

400-level (seminars):  Courses at this level are designated as "seminars" and offer the most specialized work available in the curriculum. Whether they address periods, topics, authors, genres, issues, or theories, seminars always engage the most important and recent developments in a field of study. It is useful for students to have taken lower-level work in the same or a related area. Enrollment is limited and students participate actively through oral presentations and other ways of sharing new expertise. To prepare students to make original contributions of their own, seminars provide training and experience in the skills needed for scholarly research and writing. Course work culminates in a 25-30-page paper (7500-9000 words) aimed at publication and potentially leading toward the dissertation.

While taking advanced undergraduate (100-level) courses in English should not be viewed as a substitute for taking graduate-level courses, there are legitimate reasons why a Ph.D. student may enroll in a 100-level English course, for example, to work with a professor with whom the student might otherwise be unable to study or to gain expertise in an area that is not currently being covered in the graduate curriculum. English Ph.D. students may enroll in 100-level English courses with the express permission of the professor and the understanding that they will complete a different set of assignments to be determined in consultation with the professor. Ph.D. students must complete at least 30 semester hours in English courses at the 200-level or above prior to coming up for comps. (That leaves the possibility of 24 additional semester hours in graded courses at the 100-level or above which may be taken in other departments or in English.) 

The field of English is characterized by a lively debate that has, in recent years, challenged many of the traditional assumptions of literary studies. What is "literary" about a "literary period"? What is the relationship between definitions of "literariness" and issues of class, gender, race, and ethnicity? How can literary critics address writings not traditionally considered "literary"--for example, diaries, sermons, historical and legal documents, slogans, or songs? What principles govern the act of literary interpretation? What constitutes "meaning" in literature? Questions as fundamental as these indicate that graduate studies is not simply a time to master a required body of knowledge but also a time to explore issues under intense professional scrutiny.

A coherent individual course of study can take many forms. The following possibilities are meant to suggest rather than to limit inquiry:

Study of a historical period: The concentration of longest standing at Iowa is the study of the intellectual backgrounds, formal strategies, traditions, and interconnections of writings from a specific period of English and/or American literature.

Special area study: It is also possible to concentrate in areas which cross or elude historical periods, such as the study of a genre, a body of literary theory, or the literature(s) of a particular region or ethnicity.

Cultural study & analysis: At Iowa, much of what we teach could be called cultural studies. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field often concerned with relations of power. It is based on the assumption that forms of cultural production like arts, ideologies, and institutions must be examined in relation to one another and in relation to social and historical structures. If you are interested, say, in popular culture media or in the relations between literature and material production, you may want to choose for your course of study cultural studies.

Nonfiction studies: Iowa's special commitment to nonfiction writing (which includes an MFA degree in the writing of nonfiction) also provides opportunities for doctoral study of literary nonfiction. Work in nonfiction for a special area may focus on a wide range of topics and subtopics, such as stylistics, or theories of the essay, or the twentieth-century American essay, or the nature of self-representation in autobiography and memoir, or the politics of confession in contemporary nonfiction.

Composition studies: At Iowa, the study of composition is grounded in a view of writing as a social and cultural phenomenon and assumes the interrelatedness of reading and writing, of literature and other forms of discourse. Specialized work in this area may involve rhetorical theory, theories of literacy, genres of the essay, observational studies of life in classrooms, the reading and writing of ethnographic texts, or approaches to the teaching of writing.

Foreign language study: Work beyond the departmental requirements in the literatures of languages other than English can supplement other concentrations by providing familiarity with literary texts, critical theories, and linguistic principles from ancient classics to contemporary writings. The department encourages such study.

These rough categories are meant to encourage you to extend your field(s) of concentration beyond the traditional and still very important historical periods. Course work toward the Ph.D. taken outside the English Department is an important part of graduate work at Iowa. Your adviser will be able to recommend relevant courses in other departments. Consult with the Director of Graduate Studies if you have doubts about whether courses outside English and its related programs can be accepted toward the doctorate. In all cases where the educational relevance to an individual program is clear, they will receive serious consideration.

Accurate statistics concerning the average time required to earn the Ph.D. are hard to obtain. Students who enter with a B.A. will probably finish in six years. Students who enter with an M.A.might still take four or five years. A full-time load is 9 semester hours, although a registration of 6 semester hours is permitted if you currently hold at least a one-third time appointment as a teaching or research assistant. To remain eligible for financial aid, students who have not yet taken the Comprehensive Examination must complete a minimum of 15 semester hours per academic year (the tally may include a summer of your choosing on either side). If you are receiving loans through the University's Office of Student Financial Aid or if you are a foreign student with "full-time" status requirements for your visa, you should be aware of relevant external standards for "normal progress" toward the degree. Departmental financial aid for students in good standing normally lasts for six years.

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The following pages provide details about the various aspects of the Ph.D. in English.

• Graduate home
• Steps to the Ph.D.
  Policies & Procedures
  • Commencing Study
  • Distribution Requirement
  • Seminar Reqirement
  • Foreign Language Requirement
  • Other Requirements
  • Qualifications
    • Application for Candidacy form (PDF)
  • Comprehensive Exam
  • Dissertation
  • After the PhD
• Admissions
  
• Funding
  
• Courses 
  
• Current Grad Students
  
• Graduate Placement
  
• PhD Student Publications

See Also:

• The Graduate College
• Graduate Assistanship Bulletin Board
• Graduate College Sources of Financial Support