Classics 273: Studies in Roman Civilization
Imperial Women
Beth Severy-Hoven
Fall 2006
Macalester College
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Classics 273: Studies in Roman Civilization |
Research Project
| There is, to be sure, an important distinction to be made between learning history, say, and learning to write as an historian. A student can learn to command and reproduce a set of names, dates, places and canonical interpretations...; but this is not the same as learning to 'think' (by learning to write) like a historian. The former requires efforts of memory; the latter requires a student to compose a text out of the texts that represent the primary materials of history. |
-- Donald Bartholmai, "Inventing the University" in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva (Urbana: NCTE, 2002) 633 |
This assignment provides you the opportunity to learn to think and write as an historian. Your task is to pose an interesting problem or question that requires a combination of library research and your own analytical skills to answer. In tackling this question, you will engage other scholars investigating this or similar issues in the study of history. You may investigate any problem or question about women in the Roman empire that interests you. Your final product will be an article explaining this specific problem or historical question and the conversation about it to be found in existing scholarship, as well as defending your own answer to it to an audience of readers of an undergraduate journal. Preliminary assignments are designed to prepare you to write such an essay.
Article Review Due Monday, October 9
As you think about a question you would like to answer or explore, you should investigate current scholarly research on that topic. Use the library's Guide to Resources in Classics, your professor and peers to assist in finding materials. Keep track of other potentially useful bibliography, but your goal at this stage is to select one particularly useful and intriguing article from an appropriate scholarly source and write a review of it. Be certain to give a full bibliographic citation of your article at some point, whether in the title, introduction or a footnote.
Your review should consist of three parts-- a summary, a critique, and some thoughts on where your research will go from here. The summary should accurately convey the content of the paper, including the thesis, organizational structure, and a summary of the evidence. It should be comprehensive and balanced, with clear sentence structure and good transitions to convey the author's line of reasoning. The critique is then your opportunity to comment upon the author's position, both in terms of evidence and persuasiveness of argument. Finally, conclude your review by indicating how this scholarship is important to your own work. What do you intend to do next on your project?
Comparison of Two Articles or Book Chapters Due Friday, October 13
In presenting their research, scholars must express the relationship of their own work to that which has already been published by others; progress is not made when everyone is caught up in reinventing the wheel. This assignment asks you to delve into some of the current scholarly conversation on the question or issue you are pursuing. Find two pieces - either articles or book chapters - which take different positions, disagree about the use of evidence, or contribute to the question in different ways. Provide a brief summary and critique of each, and then describe the relationship between the two works. How do they agree and how differ? How do they work together to contribute to the conversation on this issue? Conclude with an account of how your work will partake of this conversation and a few comments on what you intend to do now.
Annotated & Narrative Bibliographies Due Wednesday, October 18
An annotated bibliography is a list of research sources, each of which is followed by a brief note or "annotation." These annotations are quite similar to your article review; they describe the aim and content of the book or article, evaluate its method, conclusions, or reliability, and suggest its usefulness to your research. Creating an annotated bibliography is useful, because it helps you organize your thoughts about a wide variety of materials. Creating such a list encourages you to think about the sources while you are gathering them, and allows you to keep track of which sources you find useful or intriguing and why. I am looking for a list of five to fifteen items which are proving important to your research project.
Your bibliography will also include a one page essay that gives a narrative account of your thought process as you have been exploring questions and problems within your selected field. You should include both external details (what you read, how you found it, who you talked to) and internal, mental details (what you were thinking about, how your ideas changed as a result of the reading). It is not critical to reach a final position -- I am interested in your process, not the final product. Describe how new ideas led you to reformulate your interest, expand or narrow your focus, etc. Conclude with a few comments on what you intend to do now.
Source Analysis Due Wednesday, October 25
The point of this assignment is to evaluate in detail the usefulness of a particular ancient source for addressing your developing question. The format in which you present your analysis is open - you may write a formal essay with a thesis, present and answer a series of questions, create a hypertext website that addresses the source from a number of perspectives, etc. The only formal requirement is that after your discussion you articulate conclusions about the usefulness of the source for the issue at hand. The nature of your evaluation will be heavily dependent on the text in question, but issues to consider might include: Where, when and why was this text written, sculpted or otherwise created? Is it a primary or secondary source on this issue? Who is the author or artist? What is the genre of the source, and how does that affect its shape and content? Who is the intended audience for the work? What point is the author or artist trying to make? What sources of information were available to the author? Do we have any contemporary corroborating or contrasting evidence?
Final Draft Due for Peer Evaluations Monday, November 6
Compose an essay defending a position on the historical question you have investigated. Use the introduction to engage your reader's interest in the problem; introduce the topic, and explain why the question is both significant and problematic in the study of women in the Roman empire. Your introduction should close with a statement of your own position on the problem at hand. The body of your essay will then be your defense of this position made as persuasive as possible through appropriate analysis and argumentation, including effective use of evidence, engagement with other scholars who have published on this or similar questions, and the appropriate attribution of ideas to the scholars whose work you have investigated. Use the citation guidelines for the journal distributed in class.
Students will then work with each other to improve their articles. Small groups will be created based on related topics. These groups will meet together under the supervision of a tutor from the MAX Center to read each other's work and provide constructive criticism. Everyone will then have about a week in which to make use of this criticism and improve their final papers before they are submitted to me.
Final Draft Due for Professorial Evaluation Monday, November 13
Using the feedback you received from your peer groups, revise your article. Please note that the suggested revisions will be on many levels - more library work may well be required, including gathering more primary evidence or investigating other scholars who have worked on this or related topics. Do this sort of work first, then address concerns about the large scale structure of your argument before attending to stylistic or editing concerns. I will provide further constructive criticism on what you produce, so that papers continue to be improved before submission to the journal. Students will again have about a week to make use of this feedback.