Guidelines
In consultation with their Qualifying Examination Committee, students will develop reading lists that pertain directly to their research interests. Ordinarily, at least one will be regionally focused, and the others thematically or theoretically focused.
These lists are not meant to be comprehensive overviews of fields of research. Nor are they meant to be uniform or standardized. Instead, they should be organized around the student’s particular research concerns and created to serve the student’s unique scholarly objectives. Each list should have a title and contain a brief paragraph explaining the composition of the list and its justification in terms of the relationship between the scholarship and the student’s proposed project.
One way for students to proceed is to first boil down their research interests to one page, and then ask themselves: what literatures, regional, theoretical, and/or analytical, do they need to master in order to successfully carry out this project? Reading lists should focus on contemporary work but anchor it in older traditions.
The composition and framing of reading lists are expected to evolve as students read more widely and deeply. Students submit their final lists to the Graduate Program Office by 10am on the Friday that falls three weeks prior to Spring Break.
Aims
The reading lists serve important goals, which students should keep in mind as they create their lists. The most fundamental, of course, is to ground the student’s PhD research. These lists will serve as the basis for the field essays, the prospectus, and later, the dissertation itself. At the heart of every good dissertation will be carefully constructed reading lists. The reading lists will also serve as a vehicle by which students can begin identifying the fields of intellectual endeavor in which they will claim expertise and by which they will define themselves intellectually. Many students will eventually teach in these sub-fields; creating the reading lists will serve as an exercise in constructing meaningful sets of readings from which they can later draw in developing syllabi for their own courses.
Scope
No more than 200 entries total.
