Close reading digital archives at Milstein Library, Photo Credit: Elia Zhang.
This blog intends to answer one of the frequently asked questions in the office of URF (Undergraduate Research & Fellowships):
- Help! I want to go to grad school, but I don’t know how to narrow my research interests from [all of literature], [the history of every country in the world], etc.
Before I begin this blog, I would like to lead with the following disclaimer: I am not currently in grad school, and I can only speak from my perspective and my personal experience researching graduate school opportunities.
When applying for a research position, including short-term summer research projects and six to seven years (speaking of the norm for Ph.D. programs in the Humanities in the U.S.) of doctoral studies, candidates are always asked to present a plan for their research. What is the specific question that this research seeks to answer, what is the significance, or the stakes of this question, and what have scholars done (or have not done) to attempt to answer said question? While preparing to answer these questions, it becomes evident that as a future scholar yourself, you will have to narrow down your focus and have an understanding of the relevant sources, theories, and scholars in your proposed field.
I would like to suggest that, instead of thinking of the process as presenting yourself as an aspiring specialist who attempts to answer a particular question, instead, you should approach the application essay as building an intellectual bridge between you, the faculty that you want to work with, and your perception of the general direction of the field. While the research question you present should be feasible to be answered within the timeframe of the research program, in the scholarly world, the answer to one question usually leads to another, new and intriguing question.
Firstly, since you want to go to graduate school, there must be something, some kind of intellectual problem that fascinates you, and this topic is what motivates you to continue exploring. This topic does not have to be as specific as, say, the transaction of art objects A, B, and C between individuals D and E in the time of XXXXBC. But it will likely be a kind of problem that isn’t easily solved, or often addressed in your field: some people, in the art history field, for example, are fascinated by material culture; some by the interchange between images and words, and some by the relationship between arts and sciences. These kinds of topic-wise interests may likely originate from the particular seminar you took which delves into a certain historical period and allows you near the end of that semester to try doing a small-scale research project in the form of a 20 page paper. As you start the research process and complete this paper, you may likely end up with additional questions that you want to explore.
Once you have reflected upon the research area that excites you the most, I would suggest speaking with a professor whose work has inspired you, or reaching out to professors on campus after reading their work that is pertinent to your line of inquiry. Since different universities have different resources (for art history, for example, it is usually the kind of collections they have in their university museum or gallery), you may kindly ask for the professor’s suggestions about the institutions that excel in a particular subfield. Once you have found the institutions that closely align with your interest, I would suggest reading 1-3 faculties’ latest works to have a sense of their ideas. These professors will be nurturing your intellectual development and you will likely be heavily influenced by their perspectives once you become their students. I am not suggesting that you should “cater” your intellectual curiosity to fit the “norm” in a certain department. While reading these professors’ work, I find myself not only learning more about my field but also about the issues that contemporary scholars are grappling with, since the questions of interest 50 years ago could be very different from what people are interested in studying now. In art history, for example, decorative arts – such as the designs for tables and chairs – were not considered a “serious” or “prestigious” line of inquiry compared to fine arts: paintings, sculptures, etc, about a century ago. Yet in the late 20th century, decorative arts became an important scholarly interest in the study of everyday culture and how the functionality of objects might reveal larger social structures. This process, therefore, becomes the start for me to position myself within the current debate: what if I encounter a group of scholars who do not consider the subject matter of my study to be not important at all?
After reflecting upon your intellectual journey and the most fascinating scholarly work (usually some chapters in a book) that you have read from your prospective future mentor, I would suggest taking the application as an opportunity to articulate a question that can engage both yourself and the faculty members that you hope to work with. While my interest lies in 19th and 20th-century art, I read from this scholar who has been trained as a specialist in early modern art history about a comparative methodology, and this methodology has informed and changed the way I look at my original topic. How can I apply this methodology to contribute to current debates on 19th-century art? I find it helpful and thought-provoking to read widely about the scholarly work (that are done in the last 60 years) on my topic, and the application essay partially becomes an exploration of how I may contribute to the current scholarly conversation using this methodology. The application essay should therefore be an organic combination of your passion, resources in the program you want to apply, and the large-scale conversation that is happening within the field, and this combination will likely provoke new questions that demand further exploration. I find myself being intellectually stimulated while working through the application itself.
The last note I would like to leave with is that I think scholarly work is a life-long process: be open-minded as you select a specific line of inquiry. You could be trained in a Ph.D. program to know a lot about a certain topic and write about another topic in post-doctoral research. I find reading as much as possible about my interest at the moment to be the best way to “narrow down” my question. After all, a Ph.D. program is just a period of time for us to produce a 300 page dissertation that investigates one of the many questions that we will have in a lifetime. Our professors at Columbia, having finished their PhDs, are still actively engaging with the scholarly debate on top of their teaching responsibilities: many of them are writing new books on new subjects, and their interests not only change but also progress. Think of working on a research project under the mentorship of experienced scholars as an entry point into a lifelong journey of intellectual questioning which will benefit greatly from the methodological training that you would receive in graduate school.