Prospectus Filed!

I am so behind on posting!  But I did want to make sure to mark one accomplishment even before I get caught up: my dissertation prospectus was officially approved and filed with the graduate studies office last week!

I've been working on the prospectus since I passed my comprehensive exam last November, so it has been a long time coming.  One of the reasons it took so long is because I completely changed my research topic.  This meant doing a lot of new research, but it also meant I had to seek out and recruit new committee members to work with me.  Another reason it took so long is because I got the invaluable opportunity to work on the Katherine Anne Porter digitization project.  The actual composition of the prospectus felt like a sisyphean effort because it was the first thing I'd written since the spring of 2011.  Plus, it's a weird type of thing to write.  You have to do enough research to propose your topic as if you know exactly what your dissertation is going to say, but you haven't done the years of research it will take to uncover the actual claims your dissertation will make.

Most people in my program told me I should just get it done and move on.  I took that approach, generally, but I'm still really proud of the document.  I worked hard on it, and I think chances are good that my dissertation will end up looking something like what I've proposed it to be.  We'll see about that, I guess.

The title is "A Womb With a View: The Discourse of Reproductive Modernism in American Women's Fiction."  In short, I've proposed that my dissertation will reveal the shared experiences and repeated patterns across the lives and works of Mary Hunter Austin, H.D., Josephine Herbst, and Katherine Anne Porter.  It will investigate their various ways of grappling with issues related to reproduction and maternity in their work, and it will argue that their work constitutes the previously unrecognized discourse that I've named reproductive modernism.  In so doing, the dissertation will bring together two complementary feminist projects that have run largely parallel to one another-- modernist studies of gender and feminist studies of maternity.

I owe a big thank you to all the people who've encouraged me as I worked toward this milestone.  If you're interested in reading the prospectus, or even the one page abstract, get in touch with me via email.  I'm happy to share it.

Now... onto the next thing!