Introductory session
The History
Dissertation
Dissertation tutor:
J Smyth
Main Features of the Dissertation
•
The dissertation is compulsory for all History single honours final-year students: it is also
available as an option for all joint degree students. It is weighted at 30 CATS.
•
The dissertation must be based on a final-year History or CAS module that you are enrolled
on this year (not in any previous year), whether an Advanced Option, a Special Subject or
the ‘Historiography’ Module.
•
Joint degree students who wish to do a History dissertation have to be doing also a Special
Subject in History and/or Advanced Option in History in their final year, and the
dissertation will be linked to either.
•
The dissertation length is 9,000 words, excluding footnotes and bibliography. The penalty
for any further overshoot is a deduction of 1 mark for each 100 words, or part thereof,
over 9,000 words.
•
An outline of what is required can be found on the History website:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/undergraduate/modules/dissertation
•
More detail will be found in handbook, which you should read as soon as possible.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/undergraduate/modules/dissertation/guida
nce
Term 1 Lectures
There will be 4 one-hour talks and sessions. They will be held at the
same time and place as today’s lecture (1-2pm Tuesday evenings in
the Arts Ctr Conference Room)
Tuesday, 6 October 2015: 1-2pm. Introduction by the module
director.
Tuesday, 13 October 2015: 1-2pm. Accessing primary sources and
archives, Dr Laura Schwartz.
Tuesday, 20 October 2015: 1-2pm. Oral History, Prof. Dan Branch.
Tuesday, 27 October 2015: 1-2pm. Writing it up – the process of
organising material and putting it into a coherent and well-argued
whole – Prof. Mark Philp.
Term 2
Term 2, weeks 1-3, times TBA. Sign up for a time slot
outside room H328 to meet with Dr Smyth to discuss your
research progress as needed.
You will meet in small clusters, deliver a short (5 minute)
presentation of your work so far, and receive group
feedback. You can bring a printed plan to distribute to the
group if you wish. You will be engaging here in a process
similar to that of the academic research seminar, in which
you present a topic and argument and discover its
strengths and weaknesses through discussion.
Supervisor
• Each of you will receive regular personal guidance from a
supervisor throughout the dissertation process.
• The supervisor will be the tutor for the module that you are
situating the dissertation in.
• Your first port of call should be your supervisor. In most cases you
will not need to consult any other member of staff.
• The supervisor will help you establish a topic and suggest suitable
reading and primary sources. They will comment on any plans or
outlines that you produce. Make sure that you make good use of
your supervisor – don’t hesitate to ask for supervision meetings.
First task
• Start thinking about which module you want to base your
dissertation in, and what aspect of that module particularly
interests you.
• It is recommended that you base it in your Special Subject, as this
provides you plenty of access to the sort of primary sources that
are expected in a dissertation.
• However, you may decide to base it in your advanced option, or in
historiography.
Researching a Dissertation
Your dissertation supervisor should be able to help you with
this, once you have decided on a suitable topic and approach.
You need to bear in mind that both secondary and primary
materials are likely to be involved.
Sources
Secondary: Work in print (normally), such as articles in
journals, essays in edited collections, books, and so on. You will
need these to provide the background, to aid you in framing your
research questions, your introduction and conclusion. The
historiography of your topic is likely to be a significant part of the
dissertation and this will come from the secondary literature.
Primary: Are far more varied. Some of you will be looking at a
set of them in connection with your Special Subject; you may
also have encountered examples elsewhere in your History
modules. Primary sources might include: newspapers, memoirs,
correspondence (published and unpublished), Parliamentary
Papers, archival records relating to organizations and institutions
(the Modern Records Centre on campus has examples of these
which you can access via the University of Warwick Library
website), literary texts (such as novels and plays), early modern
political and religious tracts, contemporary medical texts, or oral
and visual source materials (interviews, photographs, paintings
etc.).
Modern Records Centre,
Warwick University
You can access information on the
holding of the MRC via the University
of Warwick Library website.
Resources outside Warwick
• Other libraries (especially university libraries): many of these have online catalogues. Many have attached archives, like the MRC. You might
also want to visit a university library elsewhere and for this you can
obtain a SCONUL card from the Warwick University Library that will give
you free admission (again see the Library’s webpage for information on
this).
• British Library; National Archives, Kew; BBC archives; British Film
Institute.
• Local archives: such as county record offices. Warwick County Archives
are, for example, located in Warwick town. This can be very rewarding
but it is time-consuming (and in terms of travel and somewhere to stay)
can be expensive.
Oral History through Interviews
• You may interview people about past events. This is known as
‘oral history’. The recorded or transcribed interview is considered
to be a primary resource – in this case you are creating your own
archive. You should make recordings of your interviews if
possible, or take detailed notes, and reference these in your
dissertation as you would any primary source.
• There are certain ethics of research involved here. You need to
obtain consent from the person being interviewed before taking
notes or recording them. You should not do anything that will
have a detrimental impact on anyone whom you are interviewing.
You should be very scrupulous in this respect.
• In a few cases, such work involves dealing with sensitive issues.
If you feel that this might be the case you should discuss the
issue with your supervisor beforehand and get appropriate advice.
It may be necessary to fill out an Undergraduate Research
Ethics Form.
Originality
• What can you say that is new about a given topic?
• Originality really signifies one or two things – or both:
• Opening up a new line of enquiry that no-one else seems to
have thought of.
• Going back to the existing historiography and giving it a new
twist. In this case it is likely to be your ability to reinterpret the
existing material, to point out its flaws and limitations, and
present logically and clearly a new case that is important.
• Commonly, it entails looking for some new source – a collection of
letters, or a first-hand account of some kind – that adds a new
dimension to an existing field of scholarship or which tackles a topic
that no-one seems to have looked at before or thought to be of much
importance.
The process of writing a dissertation (1)
You will start with a topic that interests you. Hopefully, you will have a
question about it. You should certainly set about raising questions as
soon as possible. For example, why did such-and-such happen in suchand-such a way? Or, why is an existing historical interpretation
unsatisfactory, in your opinion? You try to answer each question with a
hypothesis. As you continue your reading and the research, you should
constantly revise the hypothesis in the light of what you have found.
After carrying out the research, you have to organise your material and
write it up. You will probably need to write a couple of drafts, or
substantially revise parts of the work, before it is ready for submission. By
the end of the dissertation, you should be satisfied that you have
adequately addressed and answered the question that you started out
with.
The process of writing a dissertation (1)
It helps if you structure your dissertation into different sections.
1. Introduction, which sets out the topic, identifies what others have written
on this topic, debates about the subject. You should make it clear which
aspects of the topic that you are (or are not) going to address. This need
only be a couple of paragraphs in length, but it is important to try to get
the tone right and to interest your reader in what follows.
2. Sections or Chapters (These can be given a brief title or merely
numbered). Each covers a particular aspect of the wider topic and they
should progress logically from one to the other. In a dissertation of 9,000
words you might have 3 or 4 or 5 of these. This should help you and your
readers to think more clearly about the natural divisions of the topic, the
stages in your argument and the balance between different strands of
interpretation and documentation.
3. Conclusion. This might be rather shorter than the introduction, but it
should be a conclusion rather than a summary: what have you proved or
shown?
References
You must reference your material through footnotes.
You should also have a bibliography of all works consulted at the end of the
dissertation.
Check on how to do this in the ‘Undergraduate Style Guide’.
Also, see how other historians use footnotes.
Proper citation is necessary to avoid any impression of plagiarism.
Do not include too many footnotes or make them too long, or use the footnotes to go
off on a tangent. Although footnotes are not included in the word limit, you can be
marked down for having over-long footnotes that contain material that could be in the
main text.
Keep quotations in the text relatively short so as to leave adequate room for your
analysis and interpretation. Or, if you think a long passage is warranted, make sure that
you analyse it: don’t assume that its meaning and significance is self-evident.
Writing-up
• Do not underestimate the writing-up time you are likely to
need. You will probably need to write a couple of drafts, or
substantially revise parts of the work, before it is ready for
submission.
• You will probably write more than 9,000-words to start with.
You will then have to cut it down. You will probably have to cut
out some material and even whole paragraphs and sub-topics.
Though painful, you will have to be ruthless at this point. Such
editing is a good skill to learn. The end result, if done well, is
normally a tighter and better piece of work.
• Don’t forget to leave enough time to proof-read your
work: your examiners will not be impressed if your spelling is
incorrect or inconsistent or you have clearly not bothered to
check dates or obvious facts. You may lose marks if you don’t
pay attention to this kind of detail.
Timetable – term 1
• Term 1. Identify a suitable topic and supervisor.
• End of Term 1. By the end of the Autumn term (term one) complete a
preliminary online statement:
the current History module in connection with which they intend to
research and write their dissertation
their intended dissertation topic and supervisor
• Link as follows:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/undergraduate/modules/dissertatio
n/topic/
Timetable – submission process in term 3
• Dissertations are to be submitted in word-processed form both
online and in hard copy. They should be anonymised, with only
your student number on the title page. They do not need to be
bound, only stapled. The copies that you submit will be retained
for examination purposes and will not be returned to you.
• The hard copy should be submitted to the undergraduate
secretary, Jennifer Spalding, in her office (room H342) by 12.0
noon on the Monday of week 2 of the Summer term (term three).
• Late submission will be penalised. The rule is as follows: ‘Where
an extension has not been granted, or where an extension
request did not reach the Director of Undergraduate Studies
before the deadline for the assessed work, such assessed essays
handed in late will be subject to a penalty of 5 percentage marks
per working day’.
Enjoy the work!