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The Dissertation |
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Approaching the DissertationBy regulation of the Graduate College, a student has five years, following successful completion of the Comprehensive Examination, in which to finish all substantive requirements for the Ph.D. The Dissertation Committee: This five-member committee consists of a dissertation director, three other full or jointly-appointed English Department faculty members, and an “outside” member not on the English faculty. These committee members share with the director an active role in the formation of the dissertation. The nature of responsibilities for reading and responding to chapters will be decided at the meeting to approve the prospectus. B. The topic: In most cases, the Article prepared for the Comprehensive Examination provides a point of departure for the dissertation, but the questioning that produces a successful dissertation begins early in your course work. A dissertation topic may emerge from the materials of a specific course or from a conjunction of texts, themes, and theories encountered in several courses; often it receives its first formulation in a seminar paper. Because topics are constituted through the critical discourse that surrounds them, all topics are tied to a scholarly community. The aim of the dissertation is to enter this community in a way that is fresh, individual, and productive. C. The prospectus:After passing the comprehensive examination, you must present a dissertation prospectus to a committee composed of the dissertation director and at least three secondary readers from the dissertation committee. Within six months or less after passing the comprehensive examination, this committee must meet with you and determine whether the prospectus is acceptable. If the prospectus is not approved at this time, a second meeting must be held within the following six months. Although the prospectus should be precise enough to give your committee a clear sense of your proposed topic, argument, and aims, it is a working proposal, not a legal contract. Two general guidelines may be useful:
A copy of the prospectus, signed by the dissertation director, must be submitted for approval by the Director of Graduate Studies. The DissertationWriting a book-length dissertation is the most sustained and demanding intellectual labor confronting a graduate student. Although research and writing are part of doctoral training from the start, the dissertation is the evidence on which academic employers will judge a candidate's potential as a publishing scholar. A student who has completed a dissertation has a claim to be not just an author but an "authority": someone who has addressed a significant topic with learning and thoroughness, someone whose arguments have weight and consequence, someone who has made a contribution to ongoing scholarly discourse. A successful dissertation combines a project worth doing, the preparation necessary to do it well, and the hard work and insight that can lead to a fresh and urgent argument. Because the forms which a successful dissertation can assume are various and because a new topic may call for an unprecedented form, no canonical description of a dissertation is possible. Usually a dissertation consists of closely dependent chapters which develop a concatenation of ideas about a coherent body of writing, but a dissertation can also consist of a collection of related but separate essays that explore a general topic without developing a cumulative argument. Specific questions of form and content must be decided in consultation with the dissertation director and committee. Successful completion of a dissertation requires careful planning and active consultation with the director and committee members. Because very few manuscripts reach publication without alterationfrom the criticism of colleagues and peers, suggestions from readers connected with a press, and the intervention of one or more editors, you might consider your dissertation committee to be your first--and most streamlined--band of editorial advisers. While the form and content of acceptable dissertations cannot be effectively defined here, the duties and responsibilities of all persons concerned can be made clear. The director has major responsibility for the supervision of the planning and writing and for detailed commentary on the chapters in progress. The obligation to provide commentary also extends to the other readers, whose role as critics and advisers should be active. They and the director are responsible for returning drafts of individual chapters no later than one month after receiving them. You, in turn, are responsible for observing all required procedures and deadlines which relate to the dissertation and its defense. In particular, you must be certain that all members of the committee possess a full draft of the dissertation no later than three weeks prior to the defense. Any committee member may refuse to read the dissertation if this deadline is not met, and the defense will have to be rescheduled. Defense of the DissertationA. Doctoral candidates, having completed the dissertation, must pass a final oral examination called the “Thesis Defense,” “Defense of the Dissertation,” or “Final Examination.” This examination will be conducted by the dissertation director and the dissertation committee, with questions from the public as they are recognized by the dissertation director, who chairs the examination. There are two aspects of the defense of the dissertation which require clarification: the procedures which govern the defense and the nature of the examination itself. B. The procedures covering the defense are complex, partly because of official deadlines and partly because the Graduate College must approve the dissertation before its final defense can occur. It is your responsibility to assure that all deadlines and requirements are satisfied. The following timetable should be observed: 1. The defense must occur no later than five years following successful completion of the Comprehensive Examination. In unusual circumstances, an extension may be granted by the Graduate College. 2. Typographical conventions must follow the Graduate College printed instructions, available from the Graduate College. Bibliographical format must conform to the latest edition of the MLA Style Sheet. 3. You must file an application for receiving the degree before the deadline specified each semester by the Graduate College. Failure ot meet this deadline means that awardiing of the Ph.D. will be postponed for a semester. 4. Following consultation with all five members of your committee, the next step is to make a formal request through the Program Assistant for a specific examination date. If a member of the examination committee is on leave, a substitute examiner must be requested at this time through the Director of Graduate Studies. The request of an examination date must be made with the Program Assistant no later than six weeks prior to the defense. 5. No later than three weeks prior to the defense, every faculty member on the committee must be given a copy of the full dissertation. The completed draft of the dissertation distributed to the committee at this time need not be finial, but it should be very close. Major rewriting in the three weeks before the defense is unacceptable. 6. No later than two weeks before the date of the defense, the Graduate College requires a “first deposit” of the dissertation. It is this version os the dissertation which will be examined at the defense. The only textual changes permitted after the “first deposit” are those required by the Graduate College or by the examining committee. 7. On the date assigned, the defense of the dissertation takes place. A report of the examination is signed by all committee members and returned to the Program Assistant who forwards it to the Director of Graduate Studies for signature and then to the Graduate College. On this report, each committee member evaluates the Final Examination as satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Two unsatisfactory votes will make the committee report unsatisfactory. In case of a report of unsatisfactory in the Final Examination, the candidate may not be reexamined until the next semester. The examination may be repeated only once, at the option of the department. 8. Following a successful defense of the dissertation, the student must make any corrections specified by the Graduate College and/or the examining committee and submit the corrected final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College by the deadline for the “final deposit. C. The nature of the defense will vary with the composition of the examining committee and the nature of the dissertation. To some degree, the members of the dissertation committee serve a different function as examiners than they did as advisers. They confront in the finished dissertation not individual pieces of work-in-progress, which is usually what they see as advisers, but a complete work implicitly asking recognition from a larger world of scholars, publishers and readers. In approving the dissertation, the committee certifies that the student's completed act of literary interpretation, criticism, and/or scholarship is worthy to be made public not only inside but outside the University of Iowa. |
The following pages provide details about the various aspects of the Ph.D. in English.
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