As the term begins to come to a close, this is a great time to start thinking about what you want to focus your dissertation on. This work will become a part of your academic life for the next year and be relevant to proving your knowledge for job applications and cover letters down the line, so it is important to pick something you really love!
Choosing a specialization:
All of history provides a wealth of topics and time periods to focus on, but for an undergraduate dissertation, you want to pick a topic that is feasible for you to complete as one person and compose in a year.
To start to look at what is feasible for you to cover and what you might want to cover, explore:
- Previous dissertation topics from other unis
- Academic papers around the topic you’re thinking of
- Previous coursework you enjoyed or scored high on
- What your work will contribute to the history world
There are many different perspectives you can take on the period or event you choose to write about. Your own critical analysis is the main driving factor of your dissertation, not just decorative or background knowledge, so you will want to choose a lens you believe in and may be applicable to future jobs.
These can include but are not limited to:
- Economics
- Borders and territory disputes
- Cultural shifts like social justice movements, media, and fashion
- Public policy and governance response
- Religion
- Feminists lenses
You can also check out my topic on history specializations for ideas: Choosing What Type of History to Specialize In ⏳
You may also want to scale down your topic by taking a very specific focus on your writing.
This can mean focusing on only one:
- Time period
- Cultural movement
- War or conflict
- Cultural group
- Geographic location
- Archive’s sources
Choosing sources:
A history dissertation will mainly be focused on primary sources and your analysis of them which is bolstered by secondary sources. Unfortunately, a lot of history dissertations are limited by accessibility and availability of these sources.
You will want to consider:
- Which archives and institutions you can feasibly travel to
- If you need to pay for access to any of these sources
- How long it may take to get permissions to access these sources or how to book an appointment for them
- If you want to handle conserved articles or are able to work with digitized articles
Some of the institutions you may want to access include:
- Your own university’s archives
- BFI National Archive
- Royal Historical Society
- The Bibliography of British and Irish History
- British Newspaper Archive
- The National Archives
- Oxford’s Digital Bodleian
If you’re still struggling to come up with a topic, most universities will have example dissertations that have been completed by previous students.
Some of these example research topics may include:
- Women in the workplace and changing fashion in 1940s America
- Zines and other non-traditional publications of the 80s punk movement
- Changing British identities as a result of imperialism
- How the fall of the Japanese empire impacted globalisation in the Asian continent
- An economic history of the dot-com bubble and implications for today’s advanced digital age