Many students wish to pursue a senior project involving substantive independent research and writing. This program is designed for students whose achievements have propelled them to intermediate or advanced levels of inquiry in the humanities or in cultural studies, and who are in their junior year or the very beginning of their senior year. By completing this program in spring quarter, students will position themselves to pursue an advanced research/writing project in the following year. Over the ten weeks of spring quarter we will read a sequence of texts in common; we will analyze them not only for content but also for methodology. We will study what kinds of sources, evidence, interpretive paradigms and arguments are demanded by humanities fields such as history, literature and philosophy, and by interdisciplinary fields such as queer studies, American studies, women’s studies and cultural studies.

By better understanding what makes research publishable, students will gain a keen appreciation for the methods and rhetorical strategies that they will need to master in order to pursue their own independent studies. Students will research and write about a topic of their choice, with the goal of laying a solid foundation for a senior thesis or project. Writing assignments include: an abstract, a work plan, two response papers, an annotated bibliography, a review of a scholarly journal, description of research methods and a research prospectus.