Master of Philosophy – Requirements by Year

Required

• Registration: Two Full Residence Units.
• Coursework 1: Register for the Third Year Proseminar (biweekly, fall and spring)
• Coursework 2: If necessary, complete any remaining coursework (e.g., to complete the requirements of a graduate certificate program, with grades of B or higher).
• Language Proficiency: Complete the second and final proficiency exam by June 30th of the third year.
• Teaching: Students in year three of the doctoral program are exempted from teaching in order to focus on the Oral Exam and Dissertation Prospectus.
• Orals: Successful completion of the Oral Exam by the published deadline. NB: the current Oral Exam deadline is March 13, 2027.
• Dissertation Prospectus: Submission of an approved Dissertation Prospectus by the published deadline. NB: the current Prospectus submission deadline is May 3, 2027.
• Progress to PhD Candidacy: Students who complete all the above requirements, will progress to PhD candidacy – aka, “All But Dissertation” (“ABD”) status. PhD candidacy will be denied to students who do not complete the requirements for the MPhil, who receive a grade of “fail” or “low pass” on the Oral Exam, or who fail to submit an approved prospectus by the published deadline. 

Recommended:

• Revise a seminar paper for possible submission as a peer reviewed article
• Apply for a GSAS Summer Language Fellowship, departmental summer language funding, or departmental summer internship funding

The Oral Examination (aka “Orals”) forms a bridge between the wide-ranging period of formal coursework and the highly focused work of the PhD dissertation. Orals preparation is the primary activity during the third year of the doctoral program (the second M.Phil. year), with the examination taken early in the spring semester. The year's work should be a time of intellectual synthesis and definition, an opportunity to explore new material and deepen familiarity with material previously studied through independent reading refined by regular conversations with the members of your examining committee. 

An orals examination is two hours long, divided among three fields, and is intended to accomplish three things:

• to prepare you as a prospective teacher to master a field - defined pragmatically as an area in which jobs are commonly advertised - and to talk about it fluently with a group of faculty examiners;
• to give you a solid grasp of a distinct but related field beyond your primary field; and
• to provide time for reading, writing, and discussion that will help you develop and/or refine a dissertation topic.

For a comprehensive guide to the Third Year, including the connections between the Oral Exam, Dissertation Prospectus, and Third Year Proseminar, please consult this document.

Structure of the Exam and Reading Lists

The exam takes the following form, with each of its three sections corresponding to a different reading list (aka “field list”).

Exam Grades

• Pass: Candidates receiving Pass who have fulfilled all other MPhil requirements are awarded the MPhi. degree and proceed to the doctoral program. 

   

• Low Pass: Candidates receiving a Low Pass may petition their committees within three working days if they want to re-take the oral examination; if granted approval, candidates must re-take the exam within one month of the first oral examination. A candidate who fails a second orals must petition the Committee on Graduate Education (CGE) for permission to make a third attempt.
  
   
• Fail: Candidates receiving Fail are not awarded the MPhil and are not permitted to re-take the orals or advance to the doctoral program.

All students studying for the Oral Exam must attend the bi-weekly Third Year Proseminar, which meets throughout the fall and spring semesters. Proseminar meetings will focus, in the fall, on preparing for the Orals before, in the spring, turning to the Dissertation Prospectus. The Proseminar will feature practical exercises meant to make reading and note-taking for the Orals more fun, more fulfilling, and more efficient. 

The general field (sometimes referred to as the “Major Field” or “Major List”)  is intended to help set a broad context for dissertation work and at the same time to prepare you for an academic job market in which most jobs are advertised in particular "fields" that are often historically defined. Even students who do not work in with traditional literary-historical fields, should bear in mind that academic hiring committees typically expect candidates to have a broad general knowledge, an ability to teach introductory courses, and the ability to articulate how their research relates to the discipline of literary studies, and the humanistic liberal arts, as a whole.

All research fields are, to some degree, arbitrary constructs; meanwhile, no one's intellectual profile need be confined to a single field or a single definition of that field. Still, in constructing your general field reading list, you have an opportunity to begin to work out your version of the field in which you'll most likely be applying for jobs.

Some common general field areas are:

Other general field areas can be arranged with approval of the DGS, but ordinarily the general field should outline a field of study that is not wholly idiosyncratic and relates to some common curricular or hiring category.

There are many ways to construct an Orals reading list, whether the General Field or Related Field/Thesis Field. Students should make sure to discuss the process of list creation with their committee members, who often have strong ideas about what is required or desirable. The paragraphs that follow briefly describe three approaches to the task.

1. Texts and Issues
    

One general rule of thumb is to have a dual focus on texts and issues. Your list should have a good selection of canonical texts and those that are important to you personally; those texts should also allow you to speak to issues of current debate in the field today. Your examiners will help you make these choices, which you may revisit along the way.

2. Genres
    

Unless you're doing a genre-specific field, or working with non-literary materials, your list should engage with the major literary genres: poetry, the novel, drama, and non-fiction prose. While your dissertation may well end up focusing entirely on texts from a single genre, hiring committees will expect you to have an active familiarity with a broad generic range within any given historical period.

3. Canonicity
    

Consider your mixture of canonical and non-canonical examples. The tremendous expansion of the literary canon in recent decades has not led to a pure leveling in which all authors have a comparable presence in a field. Every research area tends to have a group of key authors/texts that are regularly discussed and written about, including both traditional "major authors" and newly prominent figures. Hiring committees will expect you to have a good familiarity with most such authors in your field, even if your own dissertation focuses elsewhere.

Orals Timeline

Following discussion with your examiners, you must write and submit a short Orals Proposal that synthesizes your thinking so far. The Orals Proposal must have the following elements:

1) One-to-two paragraphs laying out the overall logic of the three fields and explaining the relations between them. Since this description comes at the beginning of study for the orals, it will inevitably be tentative, suggesting questions for exploration, advancing hypotheses rather than conclusions. At the same time, each field and its description should be sufficiently developed to justify the selection of primary texts.

2) A dedicated section on each of the three fields, including the following:

• Full list of primary works
• Selected secondary works
• Short rationale for these selections

• Examiner names, titles and affiliations, and (if not in ENCL) contact information

   

In formulating proposals, students may consult samples available here. Submit your proposal to the Graduate Coordinator via email, copying your committee members so that they may confirm their approval.

Selection

For some students, it may be perfectly obvious whom to ask to serve as examiners; other students find it takes careful thought to work out the best committee. Unless you are clear from the outset what you want to do and with whom you want to work, a good first step is to talk to the DGS, or your academic advisor, in the fall of the second year; they are ideal persons with whom to discuss tentative ideas and potential examiners. 

Once you have an idea about whom you wish to work with, it is appropriate to visit potential examiners’ office hours to sound them out. While this may sound daunting, think of it as a chance to practice the crucial academic skill of being able to present complex ideas in conversation and respond to questions on the spot.

For each potential examiner, it can be helpful to bring in a page listing a few key topics and relevant texts or authors. This initial conversation can be framed in exploratory terms; it is quite common for students to contemplate a few topics and to speak to half a dozen potential examiners before settling on a direction.

Ideally, at least a couple of your examiners will be people you think of as likely dissertation committee members (dissertations have three primary committee members). The actual dissertation committee, however, need not be drawn purely from the orals committee.

Ordinarily, at least two of the four orals examiners should be tenured members of the Department, but junior and senior faculty alike can be asked to serve, as can adjunct faculty and faculty from other departments at Columbia. At least two of your four committee members must be appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. 

 

Non-Departmental Examiners

At times, a faculty member from outside the Department, or outside Columbia, agrees to serve on an Oral Exam committee. If you have a working relationship with such a person and want to ask if they’ll be one of your examiners, it is fine to do so, with the following caveats: (i) The Department does not financially compensate external faculty for such labor, so please be aware that this is a special favor and do not press the matter if you sense any hesitation; and (ii) non-departmental examiners are often unfamiliar with our standards and processes, including expectations regarding the advising meetings, the kinds of questions common during the exam, and so on. 

Working with Faculty on Leave

Faculty who are on leave shall be ready to work with you, even if their travel arrangements require meeting online. The only exception to this rule is with protected categories of leave such as family and medical leaves, etc. Regular leaves do not excuse faculty from the requirement to work with the graduate students they have chosen to advise.

Ask your examiners if they will be away during the period of your orals preparation, as well as during the likely time (February-early March)  of the Oral Exam itself. This will allow you to work out a mutually agreeable plan of meetings and arrange for an examiner’s virtual participation in the Exam, if absolutely necessary.. In those rare cases when a desired examiner is completely unavailable, that person will certainly understand the need to complete the Oral Exam on time, even without their participation, and will still be available for dissertation work thereafter.

Meetings with Examiners

Students should meet with each member of their committee regularly, and should at minimum meet with each member three times before taking the Oral Exam. Meetings may be collective (e.g., both General Field examiners meet with the student concurrently) or individual but they are required..

The timing of these meetings will naturally vary, as will their content. We encourage students to produce and share some form of written response to groups of recently-completed readings. The specific form that writing takes, and the regularity with which students share it, should be worked out with the committee. 

Students bear the responsibility for scheduling meetings with examiners. If you are having difficulties getting your examiners to agree to meetings, please contact the DGS directly.