Department of English

For additional information, Patrick O'Malley, chair of the Honors Committee.

Overview of Honors in English

The Honors Program in English provides students the opportunity to work closely with other Honors students and individually with a faculty member on an independent project that can function as a capstone for the major and a culmination of a student's undergraduate experience in the field. The English Department encourages English majors to apply, whether they are considering graduate work in English or simply wish to enrich their college experience through an honors thesis project.

Because the Honors thesis represents an important achievement in a particular genre of writing (whether critical or creative), students should apply to do Honors work in a field in which they already have significant experience, usually from classes taken during the first three years of the undergraduate curriculum in English. In most cases, the Honors thesis should be viewed as the culmination of a sustained interest in a set of critical or creative questions and issues.

The Program begins with the application process in the spring of a student's junior year (see below). Following a successful application process, honors students will begin preliminary reading and writing over the summer.  Candidates will take a Proseminar (3 credits) in the fall of their senior year and begin work on their theses--work which continues into the spring.  Students will complete a substantial portion of the thesis by the end of the fall Proseminar. At the completion of the proseminar, the thesis mentor and the proseminar director will evaluate the student's work and determine whether the student should proceed to the completion of the thesis. In a case of discrepancy between the mentor and the proseminar director, the Honors Committee will read the student's work on the thesis to that point and consult with both faculty members in order to make a final decision.

Work done on the thesis during the spring term constitutes a required 1-credit course, which represents the completion of the thesis in coordination with the mentor.  The final draft of the thesis is due to the faculty mentor by mid-March. Theses differ in length depending on their topics and genres, but most are about 40-60 pages long.

At the beginning of April in their Senior year, successful candidates (those receiving a minimum of an "A-" in the judgment of the student's faculty mentor and a second anonymous faculty reader chosen by the Honors Committee) will make brief presentations of their thesis projects at an open meeting of the Thesis Colloquium, to which all faculty and students are invited.

In May, at the graduation ceremonies held by the department, successful candidates will be presented to the department.

All Honors work - including the Proseminar, the Thesis Colloquium, and the writing of the thesis itself - is done in addition to completing the requirements for the English major.

Application Materials

• a departmental application form (available below);
• a thesis proposal (3 typed pages plus an annotated bibliography, see below);
• an 8-10 page writing sample demonstrating the student's proficiency in the genre of the proposed thesis;
• two letters of recommendation, one of which should be from an English Department faculty member who is willing to mentor your project;
• an unofficial transcript (prospective candidates should have at least an "A-" average in their English courses; any exceptions will be considered on the merits of individual cases).

*Please note that although the Honors Committee requests that one of the recommenders be someone who is willing to mentor the thesis, it cannot guarantee that that faculty mentor will in fact be the mentor.  The Honors Committee--in consultation with the Proseminar Director--will determine mentors based on a number of factors including student interest, faculty availability, and relevance of a faculty member's field of expertise to the topic of the thesis.

Guidelines for Critical Senior Thesis Projects

Students wishing to write a critical honors thesis should submit (a) a proposal of approximately three double-spaced pages and (b) a preliminary bibliography of at least ten to fifteen items. These two documents together should outline, as specifically as possible, a focused project with an appropriate research agenda.

The proposal should:

1. set out clearly the subject of the thesis, including references to the major texts you anticipate using;
2. comment on the significance of the subject;
3. define the specific question or questions that will guide your research on the subject (in general, the fewer questions the better);
4. comment on the principal methodology to be used;
5. indicate which courses have contributed to your knowledge of this subject and your interest in pursuing it.

The bibliography should:

1. include both primary and secondary texts;
2. provide brief annotations for at least eight of the secondary sources.

Guidelines for Creative Writing Senior Thesis Projects

Students interested in pursuing a senior thesis project in creative writing should create a proposal according to the guidelines below. They must also show evidence of substantial and successful course work in the specific genre in which they wish to pursue a project (i.e. if the student is interested in a poetry project, he or she should have already taken at least one poetry writing class, received an outstanding grade in that class, and have plans to take more classes or tutorials in poetry writing and/or to take full advantage of other poetry offerings sponsored by the University, including those sponsored by the Lannan Literary Programs).

The proposal should include the following:

1. a project description that explains the scope, focus, goals, and intent of the project
2. a brief artist's statement that does the following:
   1. Provides a narrative account of how the student came to be interested in this particular project (course work, readings, unofficial creative and intellectual explorations);
   2. Demonstrates the student's proficiency in the project's genre, and delineates the course work, tutorials, readings, and extracurricular activities that have prepared him/her for this project;
   3. Situates the project, providing an analysis of how it engages with other contemporary works in the same genre and/or its historical precedents;
   4. Outlines how this project will engage with and contribute to timely aesthetic, intellectual, and creative conversations.

LATE APPLICATIONS WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED.

The Honors Committee will evaluate the proposals and post the results before pre-registration is finished.

Interested candidates should contact Patrick O'Malley, chair of the Honors Committee, with any questions. Candidates may also wish to review the collection of completed theses, available in New North 306.

Thesis Topics

You are invited to pursue any topic that you consider worthy of attention, and we assume that you will pursue it with scholarly rigor, intellectual seriousness, and artistic integrity. You should follow your own interests and commitments in defining your project, though you should avail yourself of the advice of those faculty members whose expertise will help you focus your ideas and give them depth. Most successful applicants have derived their projects from interests developed during their time as English majors at Georgetown. During the actual writing of the thesis, of course, you will work closely with a faculty mentor.

Here is a partial list of the kinds of topics that Honors students have pursued over the past few years:

• polyphony in the novels of Cormac McCarthy
• thematic and linguistic violence in Dickinson, Plath, and Olds
• women in post-Stonewall gay male literature
• madness and skepticism in Hamlet and Don Quixote
• dialogism in Toni Morrison and Christa Woolf
• the Booker Prize as post-colonial phenomenon
• Joyce: relations with the Catholic Church
• the language of non-conformity
• jazz in the Harlem Renaissance
• the scientific revolution and 18th-century narratives
• history of the criticism of King Lear
• conflict in Seamus Heaney
• Irvine Welsh and dialect writing
• the heroic endeavor in Beowulf
• sound and structure in scripts
• American views of wilderness
• intertextuality in Gloria Naylor
• geography, literature, and self-identity in Amerindian poetry
• identity and memory in Maxine Hong Kingston
• influence of the internet on writing
• The Waste Land and mysticism
• Crime fiction and the American dream
• Double consciousness in the works of Baldwin, Morrison, and Naylor
• the written legacy of oral narratives in Amerindian culture
• women in Blake's poetry and theology
• beat literature of Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg
• medieval women troubadours
• African-American women writers and their Biblical heritage
• adult-child discourse in real-life conversation and classic children's literature
• the role of bible-making in the works of Blake, Wordsworth, and Hardy
• Morality plays in the Middle Ages and the twentieth century

In addition, Honors students have written novels, scripts for stage and screen, and collections of poetry. Those students who propose creative projects should have developed their skills through taking courses with the Georgetown English Department creative writing faculty or through participation in campus and professional journals and other creative venues.

Sample Proposals

Follow these links to view sample Honors Thesis Proposals of various types:

• Collapsing Frontiers: Conrad's Modernist Prophecy for the British Empire
• Literary Hoaxes
• Cultural Contact in Kipling's Stories of India
• Exquisite Corpse: The Surrealist Game
• A Tibetan-American Family: A Literary Novel