Programs

The Editorial Institute at Boston University offers advanced degrees (MA and PhD) to students who successfully prepare either editions of important writings, with textual apparatus and annotation, or monographs concerned with editing or textual bibliography. Guidance to students is provided through courses that cover such topics as: establishing an authoritative text; the practice of annotation; current technologies for storing, disseminating, or editing information; legal and professional considerations concerning copyright and intellectual property; historical changes in the concept of authorship; and recent theorizing about texts.

Students are encouraged to think widely about the applications of editing: to letters, sound archives, oral transcripts, music, manuscript fragments, legal and historical documents, journalism, notebooks, anonymous writings, and marginalia, as well as to the literary and philosophical writing most often associated with the idea of the edition. For more information about the kinds of projects the Institute supports, please visit Dissertation Guidelines or review the projects of our current MA and PhD students.