Doing Your Homework

Today has been one of my most productive days this semester (aside from the four hours on Friday when I nailed down my summer funding proposal). Today, I've managed to do some significant rewrites on my dissertation proposal - something that's critical since I may be turning the document in to my committee in, oh, a month or so. (More on qualifying exams later.)

I'm pleased to be getting back on track. I'm optimistic that I'll be able to finalize this draft in the next two or three days, then move on to other important projects.

But the biggest problem I've faced in this revision is the historiography. There's a term that will get your spellcheck every time. You might also call it the literature review, but the basic idea is that the historiography is one of the backbones of history writing.

In the historiography section of a dissertation proposal (or a term paper - you'll find them in those, too), you lay out what other scholars have said on your topic: what do they argue? what methodologies do they use? This information is crucial because it allows you to position yourself in the greater conversation of historians AND because it provides an opportunity to demonstrate where you think the holes or opportunities of historical scholarship are. With the paper I wrote in Summer 1, I identified the themes and arguments scholars in my field(s) have discussed, and I assessed how I think those arguments have been useful, as well as where I think research could be done in the future.

Basically, a good historiography shows you've done your homework.

As graduate students, we cut our academic teeth on historiography. Introduction graduate student seminars generally focus on teaching students to write historiographic essays, where you choose a topic and read a variety of books or articles on that topic (for instance, I did one on second wave feminism in my first semester). They're useful ways to learn how to pick apart an author's book so that you can digest it more easily - a crucial skill we need, since we're expected to read several hundred books over the length of our coursework, and even more books in our dissertation phase.

Historiography can be one of the most painful parts of writing history, however necessary it is. I've found that some of the most tedious papers I've written are historiographies, and also that some of the most illuminating papers are historiographies. In general, I confess that I dread historiography, however: there's this fine balance you have to learn about how much is relevant and how much to leave out, and for a very long time I erred on the side of including too much.

...this is probably why my current historiography on the dissertation proposal has become 15 out of the document's 30 pages. Which means I have major editing to do. As one of my professors has told me time and again, it's important to learn how to whittle these arguments down so that the historiography section doesn't obscure your own writer's voice; I've been guilty of that far too often, and it seriously compromises your work.

Some days, I fear it's a never-ending struggle. But then I look back over the other parts of the dissertation proposal and I realize I truly am starting to come into my own. So maybe, just maybe, all this homework is paying off.