HIST 392: Ph.D. Research Seminar

Jacquelyn Hall

This course is designed to provide structure, support, feedback, and inspiration for graduate students in any field and at any stage of work on a doctoral dissertation.

The goal is to complete an article-length work (about 30 pages). Some students may want to prepare an MA thesis that points the way to the dissertation for submission as a journal article. Others with only a general inkling of the dissertation topic may want to use this seminar to test potential research areas. Others may have a clearly defined topic and will want to tackle a particularly challenging or enticing aspect of that topic. Still others may be preparing to deliver conference papers drawn from longer works. In any case, your work in this course should look ahead to your formal dissertation proposal and help you launch the doctoral dissertation itself.

Central to the course will be the cultivation of your talents as a critical reader and helpful colleague. In your professional life, you will frequently be asked to read and comment on the work of others. Sometimes you will do this informally for a friend or colleague. At other times you will serve in a formal capacity as a reader, often anonymous, for a press or journal. And of course even more often you will be acting in your role as a teacher reading and reacting to the work of your own students. By serving in this course as a searching, friendly critic to your classmates, you will ready yourself for one of your prime duties as a professional historian and at the same time bring a higher level of self-awareness to your own scholarship.

Students in this seminar will come from diverse fields and may ask questions and assume frames of reference quite different from your own. Learning to talk across lines of specialization will be one of the subsidiary goals of the course. Such cross-talk requires you to articulate your assumptions and to write and speak clearly. This ability to cross boundaries, not just between fields of history, but between disciplines, and between academic and non-academic audiences, is relatively rare—but it is also often the source of creativity, of intellectual breakthroughs, and of careers that have a significant impact on historical understanding. At the least, such exposure to new approaches can broaden and enrich your own work, encourage you to read widely, and prepare you for membership in departments in which the ability to converse with a wide range of colleagues is the key to building an intellectual community. In the course of the semester, we will discuss research strategies and the like, but we will stress the art of historical writing and oral presentation.