HIST 804: Minor Field Readings and Exams

History PhD Minor Field

Degree Requirements

 

Minor Field Pre Advising ~ following the completion of Reduction of Credits, first and second year doctoral students may begin planning their two minor fields of study by preparing for the HIST 804 Readings courses and subsequent written exams. 

 

Student Instructions

1.     Choose your minor field topic in consultation with your advisor. These minor field topics should be subfield research areas within the discipline of History. Your minor field choices need to reflect specialized areas of expertise that you may use to guide your future research, teaching or other professional endeavors.

 

2.     Complete 6 credits of coursework pertaining to the minor field that you selected. (A student may have earned some or all of these credits before entering the Ph.D. program.)

 

Submitting your Minor Field Proposal 

 

3.     Draft a brief minor field proposal/abstract (1-2 paragraphs) and a bibliography of roughly 50 books. Annotate the books that you have already read on the list with an asterisk *.

 

4.     Submit your proposal/abstract and bibliography in a single document file with the Minor Field Proposal form as the first page of the document. 

 

This form is located in the right content block on this page and on the "Forms for the PhD in History" webpage in the left menu. 

 

Registering for HIST 804

 

After your HIST 804 proposal has been reviewed by the graduate committee, the PHD director will notify students via email of their proposal's approval. This email will include the scheduling coordinator for the department who will then create an HIST 804 section and CRN registration code. The scheduling coordinator will notify students directly of all registration instructions

via gmu email. 

 

Minor Field Exams

 

HIST 804 Readings Courses end with a HIST 804 Minor Field Exam. The details for the exam proctoring, submission, and grading are located below under the heading titled: "HIST 804 Exam Proctoring."

 

*This overall process (including declaring the intent to enroll in HIST 804, submitting a graduate committee approved proposal, registering for HIST 804 and completing a passing written examination at the end of the semester) must be completed for two distinct minor fields. Students' progress towards completing this requirement are documented on each individual's program of study form.  

 

For detailed information on the Minor Field process, please read on below. 


Summary

The purpose of the minor field requirement is to train PhD students in their specialized research subfields. The two “minor fields” are subject areas that you will survey using the elective courses and your individualized readings courses to gain an understanding for the current body of scholarship on your minor fields. The minor field examinations require that students demonstrate the ability to discuss the historiography of the field in a written format.

 

How to Choose a Minor Field of Study

When choosing a minor field of study, students should consider the areas of expertise that they would like to build in order to further one’s professional or intellectual goals.

For example, a PhD student who is interested in a career in museum education might consider tailoring their minor fields to cover pertinent aspects of that career path: for example, choosing “museum studies” or “public history” as your minor fields.

Example 2: A PhD student who is interested in teaching History at the university level may consider broadening their expertise in the study of History to encompass a wide selection of classes they would be qualified to teach upon PhD conferral: for example, choosing “World or Comparative History,” or other topic related minor fields that are likely to be marketable within academia: for example, seeking greater fluency in the “Digital Humanities” or global studies topics such as “environmental history.”

 

Please think carefully and creatively about what minor fields you want to take – these are an important moment for you to build competencies, and also to badge yourself as an expert in these fields.

 


 

Proposing an 804

Notice: Proposals for minor fields must be submitted to the Graduate Committee in the semester before you plan to enroll in the HIST 804 readings course.

 

The reading list for your minor field should include roughly 50 books in total – these are the books that you will be examined on.  But you will have read a number of these books in the 2 courses you took as part of the minor field; the 804 meetings will be devoted to reading additional books and placing them in dialogue with these other works. 

In theory, if every book you read for the two previous courses was directly relevant to the minor field as you have defined it, this means you would likely be reading about 25 new books for the 804 course (assuming each of the previous courses in the field taught something like 12-13 monographs).  In practice, not all of the books on the two courses will be appropriate for the 804 examination; the looser the fit between the courses you took and the list, the more reading you will need to do as part of the 804 readings course. 

One of the important intellectual challenges in putting together a list is organizing it – deciding what the relevant subfields are in the field, and which books belong where.  The exact shape of these subfields will vary from case to case, and will often involve a few drafts and some dialogue with your advisor – but in general, something like 7 subfields, each of 5-7 books (including articles where appropriate) is typical.

When discussing your list with your advisor, please provide them with the syllabi for the two courses you are counting to the minor field.  In the book list you propose to the Graduate Committee, please mark the books you have already read with an asterisk.

 


 

After the Graduate Committee reviews your proposal, the chairperson will notify you of your proposal status via email. Your proposal will be assigned a status of either "approved" or "revision." 

 

If your proposal requires revision, you will need to make the appropriate edits in consultation with the committee's feedback and your exam readers, as needed. 

 

Once your proposal is approved, the scheduling coordinator will send you registration instructions via gmu email. 

 


 

HIST 804 Exam Proctoring 

 

The graduate coordinator proctors all minor field exams. Students will receive their examination prompts from the graduate coordinator via email, taking about 7.5 calendar days to complete the exam in a "take-home" format. 

 

Once completed, students return the exam to the graduate coordinator. The two faculty readers will notify the student directly of their grade via the official grading form.  

 


 

How to Write the Exam

The format of the 804 is a written "take-home" exam. You will write two 10-page essays, answering broad historiographical questions about the field.  The goal here is to map the field and to think about the large-scale conversations that are taking place between the books, as well as to identify new avenues for research and scholarship.  You will need to draw on specific examples from specific texts to help you make this sort of argument, but the goal of the exercise is not to test that you have read and comprehended the details of all of the books – the goal is to show you have developed your own understanding of how the books in the field fit together.  So the priority is on analyzing connections and disagreements and miscommunications between the texts, as well as between different sub-sections of the field. 

The model for this form of writing, in other words, is the historiographical essay. This is a different form of writing than a book review. You need to maintain your critical eye on each book, but you need to write about the texts at a higher level of abstraction/generalization – you cannot simply string together a series of interesting discussions of individual texts.  This is difficult and takes practice, but it is an important skill. (You will need it, for instance, in writing literature reviews for your dissertation).  Here are some examples that suggest some ways one can write this kind of piece – but talk to your 804 advisor to make sure that your expectations and theirs are in alignment.

  • John E. Wills Jr., “What’s New? Studies of Revolutions and Divergences, 1770-1840,” Journal of World History 25, no. 1 (2014).
  • Peter Geschiere, “Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Nostalgia: A Review Essay,” Comparative Studies in Society and history 58, no. 1 (2016).
  • Paul Lovejoy, “The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: a Review of the Literature,” Journal of African History 30 (1989).
  • Antoinette Burton, “Parsing the Woman Question, Rethinking Feminist History,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 1 (2008).
  • Kevin Kenny, “Twenty Years of Irish American Historiography,” Journal of American Ethnic History 28 (4) (2009)
  • Emily Conroy-Krutz, "An H-Diplo State of the Field Essay, on 'Empire and the Early Republic,'"H-Diplo, Essay # 133, Sept. 10, 2015, Http://tiny.cc/E133.
  • Cornelia H Dayton and Lisa Levenstein, "The Big Tent of US Women's and Gender History: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 3, December 2012, Pages 793–817,
  • JGAPE is publishing classic book reviews that often situate the works in a broader field. Here’s an example: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781418000622
  • The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, specifically the topical chapters.
  • Foner and McGirr book *American History Now*, which has historiographical essays for many times and topics. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt8pw