When it comes to choosing a dissertation topic, students in the lab sciences have it the easiest. Because their funding comes from their adviser’s lab, their dissertations will typically be carved out of the professor’s research agenda. That practice has its problems. The most obvious: These graduate students have only limited input into their own thesis topic. They don’t get to learn and practice an important skill that all researchers need once they’re on their own — the knack of figuring out what to study.
Clearing an easy path to a thesis topic defers an important part of doctoral education in the sciences. But what about everyone else? All graduate students need to learn how to identify and develop a topic and formulate a research agenda. And it’s not an easy skill to teach — especially if the instructor doesn’t know much about how to do it, either.
I’ve long wanted to spotlight this subject in The Chronicle’s occasional series on the dissertation (earlier essays focused on drafting the introduction and the value of writing groups). But I hesitated because I wasn’t sure of what to say. Back when I was a graduate student, I got lucky: My topic snuck up on me. It emerged from a course I devised at the time. (The course was called “The Literature of the Bizarre, the Grotesque, and the Macabre,” and it led to a dissertation on the grotesque in antebellum American literature.)
The best I can say for myself is that when I did stumble upon a thesis topic, I had the good sense to notice. However, my experience isn’t exactly teachable. I’ve advised many student dissertations over the years, and I confess that topic design has never been one of my strengths.
For better and worse, I’ve been cautious about offering advice on this front. The sciences are not the only fields in which students end up with a topic that mirrors their adviser’s work. I’ve seen that happen more than a few times in the humanistic precincts I inhabit, with decidedly mixed results.
And I don’t want to dictate thesis topics to my students. After all, they have to live for two or three years with their topic. I don’t. On the other hand, if I hold myself at too great a distance from their thought process, I’m not helping them — or doing my job.
So how can students — and professors like me — learn the art and craft of topic design?
Fortunately, an excellent new book from the University of Chicago Press has come to the rescue. Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea’s Where Research Begins, is a revelation. Unlike previous books in the field (such as the valuable and many-times revised The Craft of Research, published in 1995), Mullaney and Rea focus on how to release and develop your own analytical creativity, and then how to shape it into what they call “a research project that matters to you (and the world).”
Where Research Begins is fundamentally a workbook, and it’s filled with exercises. The book has two parts. The first section describes what Mullaney and Rea call “self centered” research, which they define as discovering what matters to you and framing it as a problem that can be investigated.
Too often, the book says, academics try to “please some imaginary, external judge.” Or maybe that judge is not imaginary at all. I’ve seen plenty of graduate students — including some under my own direction — try to please the teacher before pleasing themselves. Perhaps the book’s single greatest virtue lies in its emphasis on the importance of uncovering what matters to you and separating that from everything else, including what you think your dissertation adviser wants.
Via a series of exercises, the book gradually moves the reader from topic to questions, and then to a research problem. Repeatedly in framing a topic, Mullaney and Rea encourage the researcher to look for “the effect on you.” Their emphasis on a step-by-step process to transform a personal interest into a viable research topic is the second cardinal virtue of the book.
Where Research Begins shows how a topic will enter both a field of study and a “problem collective” made up of researchers who may belong to different fields, but who are working on similar questions. For example, someone trying to learn why bourbon has become so popular in the United States might identify her field as American food studies. But she might share her problem with a researcher tracing the emergence of religious denominations in Europe, or someone studying fads in Japan.
The shift from self-centeredness to intellectual community makes up the second part of the book. Mullaney and Rea call this second stage “Getting Over Yourself.”
In moving from exercise to exercise, the book advises the reader to “write as you go.” If you do, the end result will be what the authors cleverly call “draft zero,” a step away from a first draft.
Such formulations led one of my former students to remark that Mullaney and Rea “have the best metaphors.” Where Research Begins is indeed filled with witty analogies that make reading the book a pleasure. Instead of merely encouraging the reader to ask rigorous questions, they write: “Think of a question as if it were a car,” and “stress test” the steering and brakes.
To get from sources to arguments, Mullaney and Rea ask the researcher to “connect the dots.” In real life, as opposed to dot-to-dot coloring books, you have to find the dots to connect. What happens when there are only a few of them? When you don’t know what picture they form? “Figure out which dots belong to your picture,” they advise. This extended metaphor delivers a powerful and memorable lesson on how to identify and plumb an archive.
Playful metaphors do more than make the reader smile. Metaphors, as the linguist George Lakoff reminds us, shape thought.
The authors recommend a method that I would describe (to offer my own metaphor) as quarrying. They direct the researcher to quarry, examine, and reflect — and then repeat the procedure. Discover things, study them, figure out what they say to you (including about your personal interests), and then use that knowledge to discover more things. The book’s exercises employ this recursive method again and again.
Where Research Begins is a gratifyingly student-centered book but it will help experienced researchers as well as beginners, teachers as well as students. For faculty members who advise graduate students, it particularly helps expose the assumptions baked into our own methods of thinking. I’ll be a better teacher for that, and my students will arrive at better research topics.
That’s a valuable takeaway for all concerned, but good dissertation topics especially matter for students from underrepresented groups. Many of them want to do research that reflects their personal commitments — and they’re more likely to leave graduate school if they are discouraged from pursuing those interests. That subject deserves particular attention, and I’ll have more to say about it in my next column.
