Departmental instruction and comprehensive examinations have been designed to focus students’ efforts toward a critical essay (or "issues paper"), a historical period and a "special area" of particular interest. Past choices of such areas have included "Feminist Ethics and the Novel," "Victorian Sensation Fiction," "Victorian Religion and Saints’ Lives," "Social-Class and Nineteenth Century Narrative," "Victorian and Edwardian Literature of Childhood" and "Heterodoxy in Victorian and Modern Literature." Individual faculty members have also organized reading groups from time to time to help students prepare for the comprehensive examinations, and more advanced students have formed their own cooperative and independent dissertation groups.

Current dissertations in progress:

Elizabeth Corsun, elizabeth-corsun@uiowa.edu
"Comic Pragmatism: Dickens and Early-Victorian Stage Farce"

Melissa Donegan, melissa-donegan@uiowa.edu
"Writing for Their Lives: British Women's Survival Narratives, 1848-1923"

Megan Early, megan-early@uiowa.edu
"The Performing Arts, Aesthetics, and Writing, 1841-1910"

Jean Fernandez, jean-fernandez@uiowa.edu
"In Service of Narration: Servants, Subalternity and Narrative Politics in Victorian Fiction and Autobiography"

Marty Gould, MBabble@aol.com
" Role Britannia: Theatricality and Empire in the Victorian Period"

Margaret Loose, margaret-loose@uiowa.edu
"The Politics of Chartist Literature"

Deirdre McMahon, deirdre-mcmahon@uiowa.edu
"Strange Family Stories: Race and Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century British Literature"

Mary Jeanette Moran, mary-moran@uoiwa.edu
"Narrative Ethics, Feminist Relational Thinking, and the Development of the Novel"

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