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Thesis and Dissertation Proposals
Applications for M.A. and Ph.D. degrees must be accompanied by a proposal for a thesis
or dissertation. Graduates at the Institute generally prepare an edition for their thesis
or dissertation, though we will also consider proposals that have a marked editorial dimension
without actually comprising an edition (a study of Shakespearean textual problems, for example,
would fall into this category).
The proposal should include: a provisional title; issues and questions to be investigated;
the approach or approaches to be taken; and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
Applications for the Ph.D. program should indicate the importance of the research in relation
to existing work. When preparing their proposal, applicants are welcome to seek advice from
members of the Editorial Institute.
Previous and current research by the Institute’s students
For the one-year MA:
An edition, with commentary and textual notes, of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love;
a study of Alastair Fowler’s reconstruction of C. S. Lewis’s lectures from Lewis’s notes;
an investigation of the early illustrated editions of The Wind in the Willows
(incorporated into the editor’s forthcoming W.W. Norton Annotated
The Wind in the Willows); a Reader’s Companion to The Dead Father by
Donald Barthelme; an examination of the editions of the Geneva Bible, with attention to their
annotations and to responses generated by the notes; annotated editions of John Walker’s
The Melody of Speaking and of David Gascoyne’s Poems 1937-1942; an edition
of letters, poems, and reviews related to the friendship between Robert Frost and Edward
Thomas (published by Handsel Books as Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas
to One Another, 2004); an exploration of editorial issues in anthologies of modern
Japanese literature in English translation; an edition of The Collected Poems of John Crowe
Ransom (forthcoming from Handsel Books); selected and annotated travel letters of W.
Somerset Maugham; a life and selected works of civil-rights pioneer Julian Denegall Steele;
an edition of the letters of Charles Bukowski to Douglas Blazek, 1964-1965; a discography of the
Harvard Vocarium (published in the Harvard Library Bulletin, Fall-Winter 2004); a textual
edition of the poems of Amy Levy; selected and annotated correspondence between the poet Donald
Justice and the novelist Richard Stern; an edition of the uncollected literary criticism of
William Stanley Braithwaite; and a critical edition of Mark Twain's How to Tell a Story and
Other Essays.
For the Ph.D. (normally completed in two years):
The poems of Basil Bunting; Irish dramas of the early twentieth century; two translations of
Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (forthcoming in Pickering
and Chatto’s five-volume Collected Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning); selected
letters of Violet Paget (Vernon Lee); a critical edition of poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay;
the collected poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman; a genetic analysis of stories by Mary Lavin;
an annotated edition of the letters and travel journals of James A. Bayard; the public lectures
of Robert Frost at Dartmouth; a critical edition with variant readings of Wyndham Lewis's first
novel, Tarr; an annotated journal by Gaetano Salvemini; and the complete poems of Samuel
Beckett.
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