I’m re-reading Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day right now. It’s a great practical guide to getting “unstuck” and finding your rhythm with dissertation work. A lot of the advice Bolker gives can be boiled down to treating writing as thinking. On page 5, Bolker writes, “You will learn to write in order to think, to encourage thought, to tease thought out of chaos or out of fright. You will write constantly, and continuously, at every stage, to name your topic and to find your way into it. You will learn to write past certainty, past prejudice, through contradiction, and into complexity.”
Every word of this resonates. Besides launching this newsletter and keeping a regular posting schedule, I have spent the past month skirting around my dissertation. I’ve been holding tight to the argumentative certainty that writing and defending a prospectus requires. This bit that a friend sent me sums up the update I sent my advisor last week. Bolker’s words are helping me to reinterpret this perception of stagnance, though. I’ve been standing on the ledge of a cavernous body of source material and ideas. I have no idea where my questions or sources will take me or how long this project will take. Of course I’m afraid! Maybe writing this Substack has been my attempt to dip my toes into that body—to “write my way in,” as Bolker puts it.
Gentle reframe aside, I am finally feeling ready to re-establish a steady rhythm of research and writing. I spent some of last week locating collections and trying to set reasonable goals for the summer. The plan I came up with is very much tied to the fact I was rejected from every research grant I applied for this year (love that). I wanted to take at least a couple of research trips to Wisconsin and maybe Philadelphia, but that just isn’t in the cards right now. Instead, I’m going to prioritize getting as much local archival and digital research done as possible.
Here are my overarching goals:
Revise Chapter 1
Revise Chapter 3
Complete the bulk of the research for Chapter 5
Write a rough draft of Chapter 5
Have at least two chapter drafts ready to share with my committee by mid-September
And here are the rhythms and routines I will use to move toward these:
Write 500 words five days a week (doesn’t matter what kind—just not basic source/reading notes)
Spend an hour with my sources five days a week
Publish at least one dissertation-related Substack post every week
Hopefully I will write a lot more than 500 words some days. I also want to spend closer to 4-6 hours with my sources some days. I’m trying to take to heart the advice that Joan Bolker and many others give to spend 15 minutes on my dissertation or even just open the document daily, though. Even if I end up changing my original goals, this plan will get me off the ledge and into the unpredictable currents of this project.
My plan for this week is to start digging into sources for Chapter 5. This chapter looks at Mississippi Valley Historical Association (MVHA), a historical organization that differentiated itself from the American Historical Association (AHA) in order to forge closer relationships between state historical societies, local historians, and other individuals/organizations that fell outside of the professionalized definitions of “history” from which the AHA operated. I’ll begin by looking at the MVHA’s journal and other publications by its most influential members. This chapter gets to the core of some of the broadest questions animating my work. Why are academic historians so obsessed with drawing parameters around who is and isn’t a historian? What’s at stake? And how have academic historians’ efforts to differentiate the profession since the late nineteenth century shaped and been shaped by a much broader spectrum of historical production?
If you’ve written a dissertation or other giant research-based project before, PLEASE drop some project management/writing tips below. And if you’re similarly just starting out, let’s commiserate. Thanks for letting me drag you along as accountability partners.
Until next time,
Mila
I'm loving your reflections on the process. Insisting on being a whole person during the struggle to "dissertate" is a radical act! And, thinking on the questions you raise about gate-keeping and professionalization, I'm thinking about the draft of material collected by the Federal Writers Project for the "Negro in Iowa" volume, in George Rawick's collection (never published). It's full of inaccuracies, racism, as well as accurate recollections and accounts. I'm glad it wasn't published--yet it would have offered a clear documentation of how racism shaped both "professional" and "amateur" history-writing. I'm looking forward to your further insights.