How to do a History Dissertation
As I mentioned in the last post, this week I took part in a session where a few of us who have been through the process once or more gave some undergraduates advice on how to do their IRPs (i.e. dissertations). Although we ended up answering questions as a panel, I prepared a guide to the seven stages of a dissertation and I thought I’d share my advice here. Obviously, deadlines, expectations and supervisory arrangements vary from place to place, as I found - the students I spoke to had to have far more of an idea what they were doing by the end of second year and an earlier deadline than I had!
**1. Have an Idea
**Hopefully,
by the end of second year you know which period of history you like
best, and which areas of history - for example, gender history, crime
history or military history. Once you’ve established that, you need to
refine your topic even further - 10,000 words isn’t actually that much
when you take out the introduction, literature review and conclusion, so
you have to be specific. With my MA, I knew I wanted to do early
modern gender, but that covers a lot of things, which leads us to stage
two…
**2. Get a Supervisor
**Universities do this
differently - some allocate you a supervisor based on your interests,
and at others you have to seek out a supervisor yourself. However,
having a set supervisor doesn’t mean you can’t get advice from other
members of staff, or even from staff at other universities. I had a lot
of help from all over the place for my MA - my BA supervisor helped me
refine my idea by suggesting that masculinity was the ‘in’ thing in
early modern gender, the academic who wrote the book about early
modern masculinity was happy to answer my queries over email, and my
eventual MA supervisor suggested the 1641 Depositions s a source.
That’s another especially useful thing about supervisors - they often
know what sources to suggest you use, and have an idea of what sources
are newly available online and ripe for new uses. But supervisors’
usefulness doesn’t stop there - they can also suggest secondary sources
(as we’ll see in a minute), offer advice on your drafts, and generally
answer queries and address worries. Make the most of them.
**3a. Look at Secondary Sources
**The
general structure of a dissertation is cover page ->
acknowledgements -> contents page -> introduction -> literature
review -> chapters -> conclusion -> bibliography. You need
secondary sources not only so you actually have something to put in the
literature review and bibliography, but so you can find a ‘gap’ in the
knowledge that your dissertation aims to fill - there’s no point doing
all your research, then finding that someone else has already done it in
a book you should have read right at the beginning. This is another
time when supervisors are useful, as they know what the key texts are
for your topic, and from there you can find further texts from their
references. Google and library catalogues are also your friend - if
your university library doesn’t have an important-seeming book, don’t
give up - see if it’s in your local library, see how much it is to buy
online, or ask the university library to order it for you. Another
reason it’s important to look at at least a few secondary sources before
you go on to primary sources is that if an academic’s used the same
sources as you for a different purpose, they ought to have discussed the
benefits and limitations of the source. You’re going to need to do the
same, not to mention be prepared for using the sources. Learn from
them.
**3b. Look at Primary Sources
**The fun bit…or
the tedious bit. Primary sources are fascinating, but bloomin’ hell
collecting the data is boring - for my BA it was filling a spreadsheet
with details of hundreds of early modern crimes, for my MA it was
copying and pasting many, many depositions. You can save yourself some
time by going into the archive or online collection with pre-defined
questions you want to ask the sources, so you can avoid wasting time
noting down information irrelevant to your thesis. While I do love a
good archive visit, the information for my dissertations - in both cases
suggested by my supervisors - was available online or in edited
collections. Again, use your supervisor and do preliminary research to
save time - are the sources you want available online or collected in a
book? Do you want to use old books that might be freely avalable at
places like archive.org because the copyright has run out? Would it be
easier to base your research wherever you happen to be living during the
summer (I based my BA research in Essex for this reason, then never
needed to go into the archive anyway)? What are the archive’s opening
hours, how do you sign up for a reader’s ticket, how do you order
documents what are the rules? If you’re using more unusual artefacts
like recordings, how readily accessible are these? And whatever you do,
don’t forget to make a note of the record number for EVERYTHING you
use, or risk wasting time later on going back to the documents and
playing a long game of hide and seek with indexes, URLs, tape numbers
and what have you.
**4. Plan
**So you’ve got all this
data - what are you going to do with it? People approach the planning
stage in different ways. I like a good plan, with tallies and arrows
showing the direction I want to go through things and points I really
must make. Sometimes I’ll hand-write my draft before typing it up, so
by the time it’s on the screen it’s already been refined once. Others,
however, just dive in.
**5. Write
**It’s all very good
having all the data and ideas of how it answers your questions, but the
writing is what gets marked. Again, different strokes for different
folks - some people do a ton of writing and whittle it down, others only
write what they’re sure about, some people write quickly, some slowly.
Do whatever works for you, so long as you get it down in plenty of
time. And don’t get too attached to anything you’ve written because it
might get chopped.
**6. Edit
**When I’m in the mood for it, I love
writing. However, I hate editing. Sometimes you have to add something
in, but you have to change a load of stuff around it to accommodate
it. Sometimes you have to move things to a different chapter entirely,
and it completely messes up your footnotes. Sometimes you think you’ve
written something really good, only to be told you’ve overlooked
something major or that it wasn’t relevant enough to the question.
Editing sucks, but it’s what you have to do to make your work better.
You might find yourself switching back and forth between stages 5 and 6. I certainly preferred to write a chapter and edit it before moving onto the next one, knowing that I at least had something right behind me. I’m also sure your supervisor will thank you if you give them lots of little bits of work rather than one huge thing they’re expected to suggest changes to right near the end. That can depend on your university too - how much the supervisor is allowed to see of your dissertation, and how many drafts of the same thing they can look at.
7. Hand-in and Reflect
Of
course you should relax a little once you’ve handed in your
dissertation - but that doesn’t mean you should never think about it
ever again, especially if you’re going on to further study. Look at the
comments, think about what you could do better organisation-wise next
time, and maybe consider how you could build on your research in your
future studies (if you don’t totally hate the topic by then).
As
with random skills you don’t realise can be mentioned in job
applications, you tend to forget things you did for a project that might
make for useful tips for future cohorts. Often, my fellow panel
members would mention something and it would send me back to 2010 (when I
did my BA dissertation) or 2013 (when I did my MA dissertation) and I’d
be like ‘oh yeah, this was my experience, do that!’. Dissertations are
particularly individual, as unlike with essays there are no set
questions loads of people are doing, you’re using different books to
other people, and you’re using a set of sources in a way it hasn’t been
used before, yet the dissertation experience is fairly common. Read
your friends’ work, discuss your ideas, complain about having to do a
dissertation with them!