ENGL 496: Senior Thesis

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This activity allows you to spend the whole semester working on a piece of scholarly writing to serve as the crowning achievement, or capstone, for you work as an English major. Working in cooperation with your faculty advisor, you will conduct a scholarly research and writing project culminating in a 15-20 page researched essay on any topic of your choosing within the discipline of English Studies. Your final paper must be thoroughly researched and must demonstrate your engagement with the scholarship on your subject. It must follow correct MLA style for documentation and citation of your sources. You will use at least 10-12 sources in your paper, including your primary text(s). The more fully you situate your thesis idea in a rich scholarly context, the better. Working closely with a faculty mentor, you will research any subject within English Studies about which you have developed a keen interest over the past four years. The two bibliographic projects will allow you to do the research essential to a scholarly senior thesis.

To complete research for your senior thesis, you will engage in an extended Bibliographic Project, to be submitted in two parts, each consisting of a 20-item working bibliography and ten annotations on your sources, for a total of 20 annotations and 40 possible sources.

For examples of excellent student senior theses, follow these links:

Becky Frase’s Senior Thesis on Native American Representations in American film (Faculty advisor, Professor Tim Poland)

Stephanie Saunders’ Senior Thesis on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (Faculty advisor, Professor Chelsea Adams)

Tina Vermillion’s Senior Thesis on the Importance of Feminist Criticism in the Secondary English Classroom (Faculty advisor, Professor Carolyn Mathews)

Contract to be signed by you and your advisor is available through this link.

Subject: I urge you to write about something you love, something you are passionate about, some interest that emerges from deep within you. The best scholarship comes from those hidden depths within us where the things we most care about reside. The best scholarship is something we need to write. As a reader, what idea, author, text, or issue has seized upon your mind and imagination? What texts or human issues or writers or artists have touched you deeply and made you think or feel in new ways? If you are pursuing certification in English Education, what problems or issues in education have provoked your thinking? What theories of teaching writing or literature are important to you? If you are concentrating in Technical Writing, what issue in the field has caught your interest or made you wonder about how to produce the most effective professional writing or about the ethics of professional writing? Anything that has gripped your interest, provoked your thinking, or stirred your imagination and feelings could be a good subject for your senior thesis.

If you are interested in writing about literature or culture, you can focus your project on any topic from a wide range of subjects: a favorite text or author, a problem or issue you have encountered in your study of English, film adaptations of a literary text, the works of one film director, or a popular culture “text.” You can engage in contemporary popular culture studies or cultural studies of a literary period that holds particular fascination for you. Subjects from "high" culture or "low" (popular) culture are appropriate for your research. You can bring your favorite critical perspective to bear upon a text or texts (e.g., new criticism, reader-response, feminism, deconstruction, post-colonial criticism, gay and lesbian criticism or queer theory, peace studies criticism, environmental criticism or eco-criticism). You can do interdisciplinary research, contextualizing your work with literature in other disciplines (e.g., social history, sociology, psychology, art history, music history, anthropology).

If you are an English Education major, you can focus your project upon some aspect of education, including the teaching of literature or writing in the schools, curriculum development, multicultural education, inclusion of sexual minorities in the curriculum, the SOLs, critical reading skills, media literacy, etc., among many other things. You might consider using feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial or African-American theory to analyze representative texts of young adult literature to illuminate their representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. One very important issue today is the impact of Standards of Learning upon the curriculum. How can English teachers prepare students to succeed in the SOL tests and still teach them to think independently and take risks in their writing process? You can address any number of important questions: What kinds of representations (if any) do minority students get of themselves in the literature they study in secondary school and what does it matter? (You may deal with either ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, class, or physical ability differences, for instance, and how an author, a particular text or texts deals with one of them.) How can one use writing groups effectively in the secondary writing classroom? How can a secondary teacher use reading and writing in an integrated language program—and why does that matter? How might a secondary English class help students acquire critical media literacy—in other words the ability to read the news and other media carefully and critically—and why does that matter in a democracy whose public education system is supposed to equip students to participate fully in the public sphere?

If you are interested in creative writing, you can concentrate your study on questions of technique or aesthetics in your favorite poet, dramatist, or fiction writer so that you learn more about how other writers work. You can write about another writer from the perspective of a creative writer (but, of course, from an informed perspective that takes into account your research as well).

If you are interested in technical writing, you can research some question or issue in the field, as long as you are not simply producing a "report," for instance a report about careers available in technical writing. For example, you can research two or three standard texts on effective style, as well as the research on prose style, in order to suggest ways to teach effective style to university students or to technical writers in the corporate world. You can research the whole issue of audience in technical writing in order to suggest ways to teach an awareness of audience to university students or technical writers in the corporate world.

If you are interested in Media Studies and discourse analysis, you can research how language is being used right now in the media to “package,” “market,” and “sell” war to the American public. OR you can research how alternative forms of the media are deconstructing and critiquing the pervasive discourse of a “legitimate preemptive war” against Iraq to hunt down “weapons of mass destruction” and “win the war on terror” by “taking the war to the terrorists.”

Thesis and Support: Your essay should offer a clear and concise articulation of your thesis idea about your subject. It should persuade your readers of the reasonableness of your position by supporting it with careful explanation and specific evidence.

Audience and Purpose: You should write your thesis with a clear understand of exactly who your audience is. You should have a clear objective that you wish your writing to achieve with this audience. Your audience need not be an academic audience. For instance, you might wish to address an audience of prospective teachers or of practicing teachers or school administrators. You might wish to address an audience outside the academy because your research has yielded insights that you think are important to share with a general audience whom you would like to persuade of the reasonableness and importance of your thesis. You might have in mind a specialized audience of technical writers or technical writing teachers. As the semester progresses, we will consider strategies for defining an audience and crafting an effective style given your intended audience and purpose. Whatever your audience and purpose, keep in mind that good writing has work to do in the world. Ask yourself who your specific audience is and what you would like your written piece to do for them.

Voice: You should speak in your own voice, to a specific audience, in order to achieve a particular purpose. You don’t have to sound like a “talking head” or an academic “wonk.” Create a voice that is appropriate to you, your subject, your audience, and your purpose.

Baker's Home Page| 496 Description | 496 Syllabus | 496 Requirements | Course Descriptions and Syllabi