I’m excited to share this news with the HASTAC community: Next-Generation Dissertations, a project I’ve been working on with The Graduate School at Syracuse University, is now live. Many thanks to the NEH for making this project possible through their Next Gen PhD grants.
I worked on this with Chris Flanagan and Glenn Wright at Syracuse Graduate School. Featured scholars are A.D. Carson, Sonia Estima, Ivan Gonzalez-Soto, Jesse Merandy, Justin Schell, Amanda Visconti, & Anna Williams.
The site includes interviews, project examples, resources, rationale for supporting creative dissertations, and a rubric that could be used to help with evaluation. Super practical, we hope!
Something that I think is important is that the rubric is format-agnostic. Too often, scholars doing creative work have to prove that their dissertation measures up against ‘traditional’ standards—but those standards are rarely available in writing. So grad students find themselves with an impossible task. We hope this rubric helps to break down some of the tacit knowledge around dissertation evaluation, and to tease apart the substantive goals of the diss from its format.
For me, the site is important because it builds on so much prior work in a new and concrete way—including the infrastructure and community of Humanities Commons, a system I worked on with Kathleen Fitzpatrick when it was housed at the MLA; examples and resources drawn from HASTAC’s #remixthediss, an event hosted by the Futures Initiative and HASTAC in 2014; and of course a good deal of framing that was integral to Putting the Humanities PhD to Work.
It has been a pleasure to work on this project and I hope people find it useful. We’re planning to host public events this spring (including possibly a Digital Friday with HASTAC Scholars), so stay tuned for more info. In the mean time, please feel free to share widely!