Department of English

2024-2025 English Faculty Consultants

Senior Conference is a year-long process, but in these early weeks you’ll need to quickly settle on a topic for your essay, discuss your potential topic with different faculty members, and begin working with your advisor on the project. We will hold a mandatory meeting for seniors on Thursday, September 12, 2024, at 4:15 P.M. in the Meditation Room, where you can meet faculty advisors, ask questions, and begin the work of Senior Conference.

Consulting with Faculty

On this website, you will find a list of Faculty Consultants (aka thesis advisors) with a general indication of the fields in which we specialize.

In the next few weeks, please talk to at least two of us about your topic for the Senior Essay. Do not hesitate to gather ideas from those whose fields seem outside your chosen topic. After you have consulted with at least two faculty members, please fill in the online form expressing your area of interest and your first, second, and third choice of Faculty Consultant. Submit the completed form online no later than Friday, September 27. Remember, please talk to the faculty members with whom you wish to work *before* you complete the form. If you have previously worked with a professor in class, you are welcome to email them in lieu of meeting.

We assign a roughly equivalent number of students to each faculty member, and we do our very best to match you with a thesis advisor whose expertise complements your topic; please note you may not be able to work with your first choice of advisor. Those assignments will be made by Friday, October 4. As soon as you have been assigned to a Faculty Consultant, you must arrange a meeting to discuss your project and begin the work of refining your topic.

Choosing your Topic

By Friday, October 25, you will turn in a one-paragraph description of your topic that your advisor has read and approved. Use the submission form on the website. The department tries to be flexible in the range of topics undertaken. You should begin by thinking through your own interests; afterwards, in consultation with the professors with whom you discuss your potential topic, you can identify productive lines of inquiry. Please note that your primary text may not be a text in translation. Also, you may do a creative project only if you already have been admitted to the creative writing concentration. We also ask that you select a topic from within a range of genres that you have formally studied. (For example, if you have not taken a film class, we ask that you not write about a film since you will not have substantial critical background in that area.)

In indicating your topic and paragraph on the form, be as specific as possible. If you have a very definite idea already, include that (e.g. “Who (or What) Speaks?: Discerning the Subject in Three Stories from La Frontera (Anaya, Anzaldua, Cisneros).” Or you can say something less formal: “I’m interested in looking very closely at images of windows in at least one of Virginia Woolf’s novels, maybe Mrs. Dalloway, and I’d also like to talk about her essays.” If you only have a vague notion, you may indicate a general area of interest (“I want to work on technology in contemporary American poetry” or “I’d like to write on themes of loss in fiction about refugee journeys”), but you should use this opportunity to focus your thinking as sharply as you can.

Using the Library / Meeting with the Librarian

We require each of you to attend a meeting with Semyon Khokhlov, the Humanities librarian. You should contact him to schedule your session (skhokhlov [at] haverford.edu); he will be available to meet with you between October 21 and November 15. To take full advantage of that meeting, you will want to come with well-formed questions about your topic.

We encourage you to read widely at this stage of your thesis preparation so that you develop a sense of the issues and approaches being addressed by the larger critical community about your text, author, or topic. You might also take a look at essays previous generations of seniors have written and sign up for extended borrowing privileges using the Senior Thesis Resources page.

Project Proposal and Bibliography

By Friday, November 15, you will prepare a project proposal (1-2 pages) along with a short bibliography (10 titles) of relevant primary and critical sources, and submit it to your faculty consultant. In developing this short bibliography, work closely with your advisor, who will help to steer you away from sources irrelevant to your project or unlikely to prove useful to you, and toward those sources most likely to help you in shaping and sharpening your own reading and thinking.

By Friday, December 13, you will complete a detailed annotated bibliography of relevant critical and theoretical sources for your project and submit this document to your advisor. Your annotations should take the form of working notes shaping the purpose and direction of your own essay. You may point out how certain sources will help you to locate and to advance your own argument, and you may also define positions that are unlike your own, which your work will effectively challenge. You might find it helpful to divide the bibliography into topic-based sections or to prioritize your most relevant sources. What's critical here is to make this stage a genuinely helpful one; in this sense, the annotations should be engaged and productive and help you move towards drafting the essay itself. We expect you to keep working on your senior project over the winter break.

Your final essay should be 25-30 pages in length. Your readers are not absolute about such matters; however, this length is conventional, and any essay that is significantly shorter or longer ought to be exceptional (in every sense). Please note these other important deadlines: Friday, January 31, 2025 for an outline of your entire essay and 4-5 pages of draft, and March 7 for the completed rough draft. The final draft of your senior essay, along with the “Library Authorization Form” is due at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 3, 2025. No extensions to this final deadline will be given. Any late submission will be marked down a full grade for each day of tardiness.

In your essay, we expect evidence of substantial engagement with secondary materials, including critical and/or theoretical works. You will begin to develop a bibliography of appropriate critical readings with your faculty consultant early on. While your essay does not need to be constructed as a direct response to this material, it should enter into a sustained conversation with the scholarship and interpretive possibilities that have come before and provide the critical context for your own readings. We expect your essay to demonstrate your awareness of and relationship to previous scholarship.

Those of you doing a creative writing project will be asked to produce a critical introduction to your work (around 10-12 pages), for which a bibliography will also be required. The English department has on file a packet of materials related to this requirement (contemporary writers on writing, etc.). Contact Trish Griffith in Woodside Cottage for these materials.

Both your advisor and a second departmental faculty member will read your thesis. These assignments will be made in April (see “Oral Comprehensive Exam”). They will agree on a grade for the essay. Your final grade for Senior Conference is based on the essay grade and the grade for the oral examination.

The Writing Center

The faculty and students affiliated with the Writing Center are available to help seniors with every phase of their project. You might consider setting up a regular appointment with one of the fellows or faculty affiliates early in the year.

Use of AI

Please do not use Chat GPT or other AI technology to assist you in any aspect of the senior thesis process, from research to drafting; use of this technology will be considered plagiarism. Please consult your thesis advisor if you have any questions about the use of AI.

In the first week of May, you will take a one-hour oral exam covering both major coursework and your thesis. The first half hour of the exam will be a discussion of your essay; the second half hour will address your course work in the major. To structure the latter part of the exam, we ask you to produce a list of works for which you will be responsible, divided into three groups of your own devising. This task will happen toward the close of the spring semester, but it might be useful to begin thinking about this now.

The following criteria apply: choose two works from each of the seven courses you have taken for credit in the major (these courses should be those fulfilling major requirements—that is, you should include work from at least two 300-level courses, two pre-1800 courses, and two post-1800 courses) along with two literary works and two critical works from each term of Junior Seminar. This amounts to 22 works, at least four of which will be critical texts. Sounds like a lot at first, but you will discover as you begin to look over your coursework how many more works you might be able to choose.

What is a ‘work’?

By “works” we mean a novel, play or long poem (e.g. Montage of a Dream Deferred or ‘Angels in America’); or, if you are assembling material of a small scale, we suggest you include at least three short stories or four reasonably complex lyric poems as the equivalent of one “work.” A film course might be represented by two films, each paired with a relevant piece of film theory or criticism.

Preparing your orals examination groupings

This task should be (reasonably) fun. Remember to ask yourself why you have selected the particular works in question (or better yet, why have they chosen you?). What themes run across them? What questions recurred for you in your journey through the major? Thinking along these lines, come up with three rubrics, and place each work on your list in one of them. The way you frame these groupings allows you to shape the exam to some extent, and helps us move the conversation forward.

The list you turn in will contain three sets of texts, each with a paragraph that lays out the conceptual threads and questions that organize that grouping. It will also include a separate full list of texts categorized by course; please list out each course you have taken for credit and the texts you’ve included from that course (two texts per course, including two literary and two theoretical texts from each semester of Junior Seminar). Remember to include title and author for each work. Please turn in three hard copies of your list to Trish Griffith by Monday, April 21; please also email a copy to your advisor.

Exam Format

Two departmental faculty members will examine you: your faculty consultant and your second reader. These exams are not designed to trick or to intimidate you, but to help you to realize how much you have learned. Often the most exciting exams are really conversations that help you to synthesize and generate exciting connections from the work you have already done. A second letter will lay out more specific information about exam preparation in the Spring Semester.

Abstract and Reflective Statement

In addition to your exam list you are required to produce an abstract of your essay (250 words) and a reflective statement (350 words) about your experience working your way through the process to finish your essay. Your faculty consultant and the Writing Center will be able to give you pointers on what goes into an abstract.

The reflective statement can be freer in form, and you can choose to focus on any aspect of the essay or the thesis process that is significant for you. As starting points, we offer the following questions: How or why did you choose your topic? What did you bring to the essay by way of previous reading, exposure to the topic or author, or knowledge of the period? Now that you’ve finished the essay, what new questions fall into focus for you about your topic? Beyond the argument and analyses you presented in the essay, what did you learn about conducting research, crafting an argument, and managing an independent project?

Above all, we hope that the reflective statement gives you an opportunity to convey your honest self-assessment and candid thoughts about the process in general. You will submit the abstract and reflective statement to your thesis consultant on Friday, April 11. A revised version of the abstract will eventually be required of you by the College Publications office during the exam period.

English 399: 2024-25 Calendar

Fall 2024

Spring 2025