These past few months saw me snout-deep in books while I carved away at one of the final pre-dissertation requirements for my graduate program: the dreaded comprehensive (or qualifying) exams. The exact nature of these exams varies by field and program, but in my neck of the woods (the humanities, more or less), they take the form of three essays or literature reviews, each on a different topic tangentially related to whatever you’re planning on writing about for your dissertation. The general ideas here are that (1) this lets you get a handle on some existing bodies of research around your diss material, so you have a better sense of the archives you’re in dialogue with and how you might begin to approach your own work, and (2) it does the technical work of demonstrating to your department that you are, in fact, ready to start writing your dissertation.
In my department, after submitting the essays for review, you then have to “defend” (respond to critiques of) your work in front of your exam committee (usually made up of ~3 faculty members). At the end of this process (which more or less resembles a mini dissertation defense) they make you step out of the room to decide your fate: either you pass (yay! one step closer to finishing) or you fail – in which case you either have to revise the essays, or (worst case) the faculty may decide you’re not up to snuff and recommend you leave the program.
Luckily for me, I managed to squeak by! And since I rather like the topics I wrote about, I figured I might share the essays here in case anyone else might find their content interesting. They’re admittedly not the most readable things in the world (they were written as part of an exam after all, and as a result are a bit more technical and citation-heavy than I would usually like), but I decided to upload them here as part of an ongoing challenge to myself to share more of my work-in-progress. This is half motivated by a desire to make more of the materials I dialogue with accessible to the other critters in my life (since a large chunk of my research is concerned with animals, “animality,” and their analogues) and half a bid to get over my own personal fear of sharing work! The prospect of showing off writing has always been incredibly mortifying to me, so I’m trying to rehabilitate myself and get over the not-too-helpful perfectionist tendencies I historically fall into.
So here they are! They’re more surveys of existing research/literature than anything else -- feel free to peruse the bibliographies if you happen to find stuff that piques your interest and want suggestions for further reading. It brings me so much joy to share PDFs of things (seriously -- especially paywalled stuff, journals, etc.), so don’t hesitate to reach out if you find something that speaks to you. I can totally help you get your paws on whatever!! :3
slowly learning html!