Your senior thesis proposal
will be presented to the Religion department in two stages. A first draft is
due on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 by 3 p.m, together with your revised Religion
major worksheet. A revised version
of the proposal is due at the first meetings of the Senior Seminar on January
24 and 30, 2007. Both versions of the thesis proposal should be one-page,
single-spaced plus bibliography.
The first draft of your
thesis proposal should reflect your current thinking and research on the topic
of your thesis project. We do not expect your project to have a fully defined
argument at this point, but we do expect your proposal to identify a thesis
topic, a body of primary source material, and a set of research questions. It
is important to define your topic more narrowly than you might be inclined to
do. Remember that at this preliminary stage less is often more, and it is
always possible to broaden an area of research, but it is hard to get started
on an impossibly broad problem.
In order to ask good research
questions, you will need to do some research into the primary and secondary
sources on your topic. Good research questions are manageable; there should be
data or evidence available to answer the questions you are posing. Good
questions are also contestable, but do not simply seek right or wrong answers or
factual recounting of information. The answer to a good set of questions will
require interpretive work, leading you to take a position among conflicting or
possible interpretations. Your questions should be driven by the research and
reading youÕve done thus far, and may involve responding to a problem in the
way your topic has been studied or extending another scholarÕs work on the
topic.
Department faculty will
review and discuss all of the proposals and assign advisors by the end of classes
this semester. Your thesis advisor will communicate before winter break the
departmentÕs advice on revising the proposal. In the meantime, all of you
should meet with James Gulick in Magill Library about scholarly resources
relating to your thesis topic as soon as possible, but no later than the end of
the first semester.
Format of the proposal (one typed single-spaced page + bibliography)
The thesis proposal should
identity: 1) the topic of your thesis and the question(s) you will ask; 2) the
primary source material; 3) the theoretical approach or method you hope to
apply to the material in answering your question, if relevant; 4) any
preliminary conclusions; and 5) a bibliography of primary and secondary sources
you plan to use.
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The first paragraph of
your proposal should indicate what your research question is and what evidence
you will investigate. You should include enough context about your subject
matter that interested non-specialists, such as your peers in senior seminar,
can understand what youÕre talking about.
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The second paragraph
should tell us something about who else has investigated this subject, what
theyÕve said, and how you understand your project contributing to the ongoing
scholarly conversation.
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The final paragraph
should tell us why you are exploring this topic and what you hope to prove. In
other words, answer the Òso whatÓ question (at least as much as you can for
now).
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Your thesis proposal
should also include a properly formatted bibliography of your reading on the
topic to date. We expect the bibliography submitted in January to be more
substantial than that prepared for the first draft. But even the first draft
should include the bibliographical information on the editions of your primary
sources, as well as a preliminary list of secondary sources you expect to engage.