Graduate Program

A wealth of library resources

Our students benefit from the superb libraries available on the Indiana campus, including the Lilly Library and Wells Library.

The Lilly Library possesses an unparalleled collection of nineteenth-century manuscripts, rare books, and print culture. You have the opportunity to work with wide range of unknown and underexplored materials, including extensive collections of ephemera, chapbooks, children’s books, sheet music, city guides, games, and first editions of novels by Dickens, Thackeray, and Gissing, as well as correspondence by Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others.

You can also draw on the astonishing collection of Victorian periodicals available in the stacks of the Wells Library: Blackwoods, Household Words, Eliza Cook’s Journal, the Illustrated London News, The Gentleman’s Magazine, Fraser’s, Punch, and many others.

Preparation for your career

Our Victorian Studies students train to become superb teachers, scholars, and — because of the presence of the journal Victorian Studies, which hires two new graduate student editors each year — editors.

Our Victorianists have gone on to postdoctoral fellowships at such places as Rutgers University and the Wesleyan Center for the Humanities, and have found tenure-track positions at Yale University, Duke University, the University of Toronto, the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, Berea College, Guelph University, Western Michigan University, Wright State University, Vassar College, New York University, the University of Connecticut, Michigan State University, Franklin and Marshall University, the University of Notre Dame, Webster University, Virginia Tech, Brigham Young University, the University of Manitoba, the University of Texas, Arlington, Judson College, and Western Washington, among many other schools.

We have also seen our graduates take positions in postsecondary education at schools such as Bard High School Early College (Cleveland, Ohio) and the Horace Mann School (NYC); in publishing, at firms such as Taylor & Francis, Routledge, and Thomas Riggs & Co; and alt-ac positions at such organizations as the Wildlife Conservation Society and Legal Services NYC (as development writer).