Portrait of a Young Man, Bronzino, the MET
- Choose a topic you’re interested in. People often talk about the importance of choosing a research topic that you’re passionate about. Passion can be helpful, but I think that curiosity is even more important. The first research project I pursued was about Oscar Wilde’s poetry, which wasn’t something that I had always loved—in fact, a key part of my project focused on why Wilde’s poems failed. But I had a research question about these poems that I was very curious about. Neither before, nor during, nor after my project did I feel any real aesthetic or emotional attachment to these poems, but my scholarly interest in them continued to increase the more I learned about them. This curiosity was the driving force of my research, and I think it can be an even stronger motivation than passion.
2. Find a knowledgeable advisor. As an undergraduate researcher, a strong advisor can make all the difference between a successful project and a frustrating one. They can give you valuable guidance about how to shape your research question, as well as about key sources to start with. My advisor recommended three invaluable books to me about literary influence that I doubt I would have found without him. They ended up shaping my critical lens for the project a great deal, and my final paper would have been vastly different (and worse) without them. A good advisor can also be a wonderful support when you inevitably feel stuck.
3. Differentiate yourself. One of the hardest parts of conducting a research project is feeling like everything about your topic has been said already. An English professor once told me about the universal and uniquely frustrating experience among academics of finding a source that says everything that you were planning to say. Primary and secondary texts are talked about a lot, and for good reason. Except for in very unusual circumstances, both are crucial to any humanities research project: You need primary sources to shape your perspective, but you need secondary sources to figure out how what you’re saying is new. The more relevant secondary sources you read, the more you’ll see that they’re all in conversation with one another, constantly citing each other in agreement or disagreement. Your job is to figure out how you can join that conversation.
4. Take notes. One of the most frustrating and time-consuming things that can happen to you while doing research is knowing that a source had something valuable to say but not remembering what it was. Then you have to spend a long time rereading (or reskimming) it, trying desperately to find the golden nugget. Or, even worse, when you remember what an important source said but not what the source itself was. There are lots of different ways to take notes, but it’s crucial that you have some way of extracting important information from sources so you don’t have to spend precious time rereading them. It may seem tedious in the moment, but your future writing self will thank you.
5. Keep an open mind. You should start your project with a question, not a thesis. Keep your mind free and open to different possibilities. As you read, little wisps of possible arguments will probably float across your mind. Write them down and stay on the look-out for how other sources support or contradict these arguments, but don’t commit yourself to anything. An easy pothole to fall into is attaching yourself to a seemingly exciting argument early on and then discarding any sources that don’t support it. Eventually, this argument may seem less plausible than it initially appeared. And even if you do stick with it, it won’t be as rigorous as it could have been because you dismissed contradictory sources. Think seriously about opposing perspectives. You never know how your mind might change.
Sagar Castleman, CC’26