PROCEDURES FOR DOCTORAL FIELD EXAMINATIONS
(effective 30 March 1998, revised 1 February 2008)

  No later than 63 attempted semester credit hours into the doctoral program, a student proceeds to the doctoral field examination, a sequence of three written sections as well as one oral section.  The examining committee, composed of three regular members of the faculty, oversees definition and preparation of the three examination fields within the guidelines established by the program.

Students present no more than two of the three fields from any one area (Aesthetic Studies, History of Ideas, or Studies in Literature) of the program.  The fields themselves should be broadly conceived research and teaching fields rather than narrow topics. These fields (and their accompanying reading lists) may complement one another but may not substantively overlap, and at least one should be dedicated to study of an issue or topic over a period of two hundred years or more.  Those students working principally in HUHI must present both a period field and a related topic field.

By the 45th semester of attempted credit hours in the doctoral program, the student submits to the School's Associate Dean for Graduate Studies a formal list of the three exam fields, signed by the committee members supervising each.  The Associate Dean must certify that the fields fall within the general parameters established by the program before sending them on to the office of the University's Dean of Graduate Studies.  With this list, or within the semester of its submission, the student also submits initial working bibliographies for the three fields, each of which all committee members have approved. The student submits the final bibliography for each field to the Associate Dean when the qualifying examination itself is scheduled.

The three written sections are take-home examinations. Students receive two questions for each exam field at 10 a.m. on one day and must return a paper on one of the two questions twenty-four hours later at the graduate desk in the Arts and Humanities office.  Each paper is paginated, double-spaced, and presented in clear 10- or 12-point type.

Students may space the three written sections as much as one week apart, and they are followed with a two-hour oral section that may address the written papers, the three general examination fields, as well as the student's possible dissertation topic(s).  The maximum time for completion of the entire examination sequence is twenty weekdays.