Guidelines for Capstone Essays
All doctoral students in the History and Culture program are required to write
three capstone essays in the third year of their graduate studies. For each of these essays,
the student will master, summarize, and criticize a body of historical literature. The
essays should address the following three fields:
Field 1: Intellectual and cultural history.
Field 2: A specialized field in history other than intellectual/cultural history.
Examples include political history, diplomatic history, disability history, social
history, or any other subfield supported by the teaching and research expertise of
the History and Culture faculty.
Field 3: An interdisciplinary field that explores the intersections between history
and another discipline, such as literary studies, classics, anthropology, political
science, sociology, art history, or economics.
You don’t have to reach a hard and fast decision about your three fields in your
first semester of coursework, but you should begin to think about them. In consultation
with your faculty advisor, plan your course selections with your future capstone essays in
mind. You should take at least two courses covering each field.
More serious planning should begin early in your final semester of coursework.
Obtain a Capstone Essays Petition from the convenor or the CSGS office. Then sit down
with your faculty advisor to plan out your three fields. Select a First Reader and Second
Reader for each field – and make sure they are agreeable to working with you. Then fill
out the petition and send it to the convenor. Once it is approved by the convenor and the
Committee on Academic Standing, you are ready to begin work on your readings. Make
sure the approval process is completed before the end of the semester: then, once you
have finished all your course work, you can start immediately on your capstone essays.
Meet individually with all three of your First Readers, who will help you plan out
your reading lists. The list for each essay should run to 30-40 books or the equivalent in
articles, all secondary works rather than primary texts. (We assume that you have
covered essential primary sources in your coursework.) The final essay itself should be
30-40 pp. of text, plus a complete bibliography. While you are reading and writing, you
should meet occasionally with your Readers to discuss your work and thrash out ideas.
How broad an area should each essay cover? Obviously it should be focused, but
not as specialized as a dissertation topic. The point of this exercise is to demonstrate to
potential employer that you are prepared to teach in certain areas, so your subject should
be a plausible title for a college course. For example, you obviously can’t cover the
whole field of cultural history, nor should you limit yourself to the French response to
Jerry Lewis, but an essay on modern French cultural history would be about right.
Each essay should survey and criticize recent work in a given historiographical
subfield. Which questions are scholars addressing – or overlooking? What
methodologies are they using – or ignoring? What debates are they engaged in, and what
is their state of play? Convey some sense of how this subfield has developed over time.
Conclude with suggestions for future research. You should touch on most (though not
necessarily all) of the works on your reading list. Your bibliography should include all
the works you read, whether or not you actually discussed them.
Completed essays should be e-mailed to the Caspersen School office
(jmontros@drew.edu) , which will forward them to your First and Second Readers. They
can assign one of three grades: Qualified with Distinction (QD), Qualified (Q), or Not
Qualified (NQ). You need at least two Q grades to pass. In case of a split decision
(Q/NQ) the essay goes to a Third Reader selected by the Convenor. If your essay does
not receive a passing grade, you can revise and resubmit, but be sure to consult first with
your First and Second Readers. (Readers normally do not write comments on capstone
essays.) All three capstone essays must be satisfactorily completed by the end of the
third year of study (for full-time students) or within two years of the completion of course
work (for part-time students).