“Messing Around with the Past”: History Alums Reflect on Writing an Honors Thesis
“Messing Around with the Past”: History Alums Reflect on Writing an Honors Thesis
By Keith Woodhouse with Special Thanks to History Work Study Claire Coffey
Last year Ken Alder wrote a newsletter piece about the dozens of thesis writers he helped advise in the 1990s. Ken contacted those students and reported back with stories about their careers since graduation as well as more general thoughts about the value of the thesis experience, the practice of history then and now, and the nature of historical thinking.
Without trying to recreate Ken’s fascinating retrospective, we wanted to similarly check in with veterans of History 398—the senior thesis seminar. We asked for updates from our alums and got a handful of enthusiastic responses.
Nearly all of the respondents are academics of one stripe or another. Arianne Urus (2009) received a PhD in Early Modern European history from New York University; her first book (in progress) is about the political ecology of eighteenth-century cod fisheries in Newfoundland. Michael Marsh-Soloway (2009) has a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Virginia, and has written a book about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s studies at the St. Petersburg Main Engineering School and how mathematical concepts shaped subtexts in Dostoevsky’s novels. Max Clarke (2009) has a J.D., has founded and sold one company, and is currently building another. Monica Bykowski (2010) earned a PhD in History from the University of Notre Dame, where she focused on nineteenth-century Russian history and in particular the experiences of peasants under serfdom. Annie Boniface (2018) is currently earning a PhD in History at Harvard, where she writes about U.S. military psychiatrists during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Fiona Maxwell (2018) has a PhD in History from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation focused on art, politics, and education in Chicago’s Progressive Era settlement houses.
All of our respondents describe the thesis experience as valuable and even formative, whether or not it ended up having a direct connection to future work and career paths. Urus, who is now an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University specializing in the legal and environmental history of the Atlantic World, wrote a senior thesis called “Body Business: Power Through Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris.” The senior thesis seminar, she says, “was a transformative experience.” It prompted her to undertake archival research in Paris, where digging through documents in order to piece together a story “made [her] feel like a detective” and got her hooked on historical investigation. Bykowski, who wrote her thesis on the historical methods of the Medieval chronicler Jean Froissart and now works as a Lead User Experience Researcher and also an adjunct professor at Waubonsee Community College, calls the thesis seminar “a very empowering experience,” one that provided her with “the skills and confidence to pursue a higher degree in history.”
Marsh-Soloway wrote a thesis called “Interactions Along the Fault Lines of Civilizations: Investigating Literary Transitions and Legacies in Russian Accounts of the Caucasian Conquest, 1817-1864.” He is now the Director of Global Studio and Senior Teaching Faculty in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Richmond, as well as an amateur roboticist. Marsh-Soloway remembers the thesis experience as “my first foray into multilingual primary source research.” That initial dive into the research process “laid the foundation for the skills, insights, and sensitivities that contributed to my readiness, maturity, and investigative awareness,” to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Virginia. Clarke’s thesis examined the regulation of opium in the United Kingdom during the rise of the germ theory of disease. Since graduation he has completed law school, practiced corporate law, worked at a major defense contractor, sold a company, and is now developing a second. The subject matter of his thesis “bears no relation to my work today,” he writes, “but nearly everything useful I have done in life has grown out of my training in deep research and a willingness to teach myself unfamiliar material. Nothing develops those skills better than an open ended, long-form research project, and no setting suits such a project better than an undergraduate program.”
Boniface, who wrote a thesis titled “Frozen Assets: Exploiting Antarctica, 1820-1959” and who is now earning her history PhD, had never considered becoming a historian until taking the thesis seminar with Kevin Boyle. But the writing, the research, and the sense of fellowship among thesis writers convinced her that she “could and should keep messing around with the past.” Maxwell was in the same class as Boniface, and her thesis looked at how working-class immigrant children shaped theater education at Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in North America. This fall Maxwell will begin as an assistant professor of history at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. As she starts her new job, Maxwell notes, she will keep in mind Kevin’s knack for “demystifying history,” as well as how he “affirmed that the ‘ordinary’ city dwellers I chose to study—no matter their poverty, obscurity, or youth—deserved to be at the center of historical analysis.” This sort of careful guidance might be “difficult to match,” Maxwell grants, but it nonetheless provides a model for an aspiring teacher and scholar.
Each year a small group of history majors takes on the arduous task of writing a senior thesis. It is a grueling process, but one that teaches lasting lessons. It also creates a sense of community that does not easily dissipate. At the most recent American Historical Association conference Kevin Boyle, Fiona Maxwell, and Annie Boniface had coffee together. Amid the largest annual gathering of historians in the United States, Boniface remembered History 398 as “the historical field at its best.”