Research and Thesis

Timetable

Colleges vary in how early they encourage or require students to start thinking about a thesis-topic. But from the middle of Trinity Term of the second year the timetables converge, and the final Hilary Term is entirely devoted to the thesis for main-school History undergraduates. Joint-school students may need to follow a different timetable, for instance by dividing their research and writing between the final Michaelmas and Hilary Terms.

 

2nd year Hilary Term
  • Attend Faculty Lecture, Framing an Undergraduate Thesis.

(Colleges may have started the process of framing a topic.)
Trinity Term
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  • 1st week: Attend the Undergraduate Thesis Fair in Examination Schools.
  • Early: by now College tutors will have asked you to identify the general field you want to research.
  • Refine the topic and identify possible sources so as to be able to:
    • Meet a specialist supervisor.
    • Identify historiography, both of the broad field and related to the specific issues you wish to research.
    • Identify and sample sources to identify precisely the questions they can answer, leading to more precise identification of the body of source-material.
    • Work out any training needs to enable you to conduct the research.
    • Work out a timetable and plan for the rest of the process.

You should have a viable project by the beginning of the long vacation; this means one that you know will work in terms of finding sources accessible to you which will answer the questions you put to them. Although the questions may evolve somewhat in the course of detailed research, you need to know that the sources will produce enough material for you to build arguments on.
Long Vacation You may need to conduct some or even all of the primary research, if your sources are abroad or otherwise far away; or you may wish to make progress either with the primary evidence, and/or with secondary reading. Perhaps sketch out an initial structure for the thesis in the light of these.
3rd year Michaelmas Term

Apart from the two moments below, you should not assume that you will be able to make any progress with your thesis between early October and mid- January, given the demands of the Special Subject, which counts for two out of seven of your Finals marks

  • Start: Meeting with supervisor to report progress.
  • Friday of 6th week: Submit proposed title and brief synopsis (not more than 250 words) for the approval of the Chair of the FHS Board of Examiners by Friday of week 6, using the thesis title submission form from Canvas here:  https://canvas.ox.ac.uk/courses/21314

See the guidelines for writing this synopsis in General Appendix D of the Undergraduate Handbook.
Hilary Term

Note that some supervisors may ask for chapters to be rewritten and submitted successively through the term rather than all in one towards the end. This will partly depend on the nature of your sources, since in some cases you will not be able to start writing the main chapters until all the research is complete. What follows is a common but not universal pattern.

  • 1st-4th weeks: complete research and secondary reading.
  • Consultation meetings with supervisor as appropriate.
  • Friday 4th week: deadline for changes to the original title to be submitted for the approval of the Chair of the FHS Board of Examiners.
  • Mid-term: refine and finalise plan, with supervisor’s advice.
  • 5th & 6th weeks: write a draft (or redraft previous drafts if you have done some).
  • c.7th week: final meeting with supervisor to receive feedback on draft.
  • 7th-8th weeks: final draft taking account of feedback; finalise footnotes and bibliography, leading to hand-in.

Please do not give your supervisor a draft of the thesis in week 8 and expect a 24 hour turnaround.

 

The thesis requires commitment, and a very high level of personal motivation and organization. The burden of time-management and effective working falls on you. The eight weeks of Hilary Term are not a long time for this exercise, which is why it is essential to have identified a viable topic and sources in the second year and to make a plan for the remaining time then. Moreover, in that final term you need to use your time very efficiently. The student who has not thought through the initial practicalities of the thesis subject before the beginning of term, or who spends four weeks pursuing unrealistic research goals, or above all the students who fritters away half or more of the term not getting down to serious work, will have insurmountable problems in pulling together an adequate thesis. It is important to be aware that the Examiners will judge a thesis against the amount of work that a diligent undergraduate could be expected to have done over a full academic term. A submission based on obviously limited reading and amounting to little more than a longer version of a tutorial essay will be heavily penalized. It is possible to gain exceptionally high marks for a thesis, and some students who do not excel in closed examination papers demonstrate spectacular prowess in such work submitted in their own time. But it is also possible to gain far worse marks for a bad thesis than for a moderately poor performance in a three-hour paper.

The exercise is challenging, and intentionally so. The final advice must therefore be: start thinking about your thesis early; make good use of the summer vacation; and leave plenty of time for editing once you have completed the first draft.

Supervision

Initially your college tutors will help you to move from the field you want to investigate and probably rather broad questions to a viable research-project based on an identified set of sources. At a suitable juncture in this process they will arrange a meeting – probably around the middle of Trinity Term – with a specialist. Your supervisor will help you to identify the relevant historiography, to refine your research questions, and to identify sources which will be accessible to you. They will also help with training, practicalities, and making a plan of campaign. Thereafter they will be available for consultation – including by email – as you conduct your secondary reading and research, and may require you to report in occasionally. They may, however, not be able to respond quickly during the long vacation.

During Hilary Term they will advise on research, help refine your detailed plan, and comment on one draft of the thesis (although they are obliged not to correct it in detailed matters of presentation). They may wish to do this for separate chapters through the term, or in a single read-through in sixth or seventh week. Note that tutors who have a heavy load of supervisees will need to establish a firm timetable: if you miss their deadlines, you may miss the chance to receive sufficient feedback, or may not have enough time to incorporate it into a revised final version.

The total time spent in all meetings with your college history tutors and specialized supervisor must not exceed five hours. This covers all forms of advisory communication, including email exchanges.

See the Faculty of History website for a list of all History tutors and their fields of interest. Discuss in the first instance with your college tutor.

Framing a Topic

The choice of subject requires careful thought. There is a tendency for students to cluster around topics in modern British history which may seem more accessible or ‘safer’, but there is no need for this if you would like to pursue interests in other times and places. You may work with primary sources that have been translated into a language that you can read, or if you have some ability to read a language but not fluency in it, you may use translations to help you navigate the original language. Supervisors will be able to advise about this, but it is worth noting that a surprisingly wide range of texts from different periods and original languages are available in English-language translations and it is always a good idea to ask rather than to assume that you won’t be able to work on something. As supervisors with expertise in modern British history are often oversubscribed, and it can be harder to find a ‘new’ topic to work on, it is a good idea to consider other possibilities even if you end up concluding that you do want to write a modern British thesis. It is also a chance to work on topics that you may not have been able to study in detail elsewhere in your degree (although be cautious about taking on something about which you don’t know anything unless you’re prepared to dedicate a lot of time to groundwork over the summer). You may also want to think about oral history projects in which you – in a sense – generate your own body of source material through interviews with living people. If this interests you, you should consult with a potential supervisor early as it can be a very complex process to design an oral history project and locate your interviewees.

Refining a topic from broad issues down to a viable project involves an equation between the questions and the sources. You may have a clear idea about what you want to find out, perhaps generated by the historiography, and then need to find sources which will answer those questions. Or you may start from a body of sources and, in the process of probing them, work out what they will enable you to say in the light of the historiographical context – or possibly in the absence of any relevant historical writing on them. And in the former case you may discover that your proposed sources won’t answer your initial questions but (if you don’t then choose to try to find other ones which will) will shed light on other equally interesting issues. Whichever way, you need to allow the questions and the sources to conduct a dialogue from which a clear topic and a practical plan of research will emerge.

The topic will almost certainly end up being much narrower than you originally envisage. Many students begin by proposing what is in effect a tutorial essay: but this is much too large to provide a viable research-project. You are not going to establish the causes of the Reformation in 12,000 words, and may end up just writing an essay with some primary- source illustration (which will max out at a 2.2). This is not the same as a research thesis in which the conclusions arise from an analysis of the sources. You therefore have to find a way of potentially shedding light on large problems through smaller and more precisely defined sub-questions. And your sources must be manageable in terms of the amount of time it will take to read them. On the other hand, just identifying some sources and hoping that they will enable you to say something is equally inadequate: your initial testing needs to establish that the evidence will speak to some agenda – in the historiography or possibly of your own – which will enable you to construct a meaningful historical argument. You therefore have to be both ambitious and realistic about what can be achieved in the available time and word-length. In the best theses the process of limited research into precisely defined questions will shed light on larger issues of historical discussion.

Your thesis will almost certainly be new, which will make it ‘original’. Originality in historical writing is not a matter of coming up with a great theory which will change the world, but simply making progress on a historical question or possibly in finding new material. You may start with a well-worn question which can be reassessed, perhaps by looking at new sources, or by looking at sources already deployed in new ways: new theoretical approaches may come into play here to help you reconceptualize the issues. Or you may think that historians have not asked a particular question in a particular field: perhaps comparison with other historiographies or theories will have alerted you to the possibility of probing this issue. You may then examine well-thumbed sources to examine these new questions. So not everything about your research needs to be new: but the combination of your questions and the sources you use will generate a new piece of work which can be said to be original.

It can be impressive to investigate unpublished sources, especially if they are in difficult languages and inaccessible forms such as virtually illegible handwriting. It is not necessary, however, to use unpublished material. Your examiners are aware that not all students will be able to travel to far-off archives or read non-English sources, but, more importantly, it is primarily the use that is made of evidence in the light of the questions asked of it that will determine the quality of the thesis. There are many kinds of published materials available, including non-verbal sources, and increasingly so with digitization; and translations of sources also help to open up access to cultures which might otherwise be inaccessible.

The librarians and curators of Oxford’s many specialist collections welcome well-organized undergraduate historians who seek to use their materials. Experience suggests that many thesis writers have found intellectual riches in libraries or collections they scarcely knew existed prior to the annual Thesis Fair. Students seeking to consult rare books and manuscripts in the Bodleian system may be required to download a permission form and obtain their tutor or advisor’s signature.

Research and Planning

Once you have framed a viable research-project, you may be able to sketch out how it might look as a structured thesis. The structure might be determined by a succession of questions you wish to ask, or by the examination of a succession of different sources. Your initial plan, however, is almost certain to change in the course of your detailed research. Even so, it is good to start with a hypothetical plan which can then evolve in the light of experience.

This is partly to ensure that your research does not constitute the mere collecting of information. Immersion in sources can be fascinating, and there is a temptation to carry on doing it for its own sake. But as you accumulate material, you should think about its significance and the arguments it may be suggesting. You may have started with a clear hypothesis which you will need to keep testing and refining – or possibly rejecting – as you go along. Or your questions may acquire more definition in the light of the specific evidence. Don’t leave it until you have finished your primary research to start thinking about what it all might mean. If you keep thinking all the way through, you will arrive at the end with a clearer sense of an argument already taking shape. Indeed you may be able, in a limited way, to take your later research in unanticipated directions: you may need to ask new questions of your original sources, or your revised hypotheses may point you to sources you hadn’t originally planned to consult. In this way your analysis will go further than it would if you turned off your thinking during research.

Your plan will therefore evolve with your argument. Undergraduate theses often have three substantive chapters, but both two and four are common. As with a tutorial essay, the structure must be dictated above all by the argument you wish to make.

Grants to support travel for the purposes of research

If your research requires you to travel to visit libraries and archives, you may apply to:

The Colin Matthew Fund

Established for the promotion and encouragement of historical study or research within the University. It currently offers grants to support travel for the purposes of research, application for which may be made by undergraduates as well as graduates. Undergraduates who need to travel to undertake research for their thesis are particularly encouraged to apply. Grants may be awarded up to the value of £500.

The number of awards available and the application procedure will be announced at the beginning of Hilary Term, and applicants notified of the outcome early in Trinity Term. Application forms may be obtained from the Secretary to the Fund: The Senior Bursar, St Hugh’s College, from the start of Hilary Term.

Completed forms must be submitted by Friday of fourth week of Trinity Term. Applicants are asked to ensure that their tutor or supervisor writes a letter in support of their application by the same date. Applications and letters of support should be addressed to the Bursar’s Secretary, St Hugh’s College, Oxford 0X2 6LE.

 

The Laurence Binyon Prize

Awarded for travel to Asia, the Far East, or another area outside Europe, to extend knowledge and appreciation of the visual arts. Value up to £1,000. The holder of the prize will be expected to submit a report on their travels after return.

Candidates should apply in writing to: The Secretary to the Inter-faculty Committee for the History of Art, History Faculty, Old Boys’ High School, George Street, Oxford OX1 2RL. 2021 details not yet published.

 

Writing

In addition to your substantive chapters, you will need to spend time on framing your introduction. It should be clear by now that how you set up your topic is integral to its success, and this is as true of the introduction as it is of the framing process itself. You will need to make clear what questions you are asking, and how these relate to the current and past historical literature on the topic (or perhaps why there is none); and there may be theoretical background to your agenda which you need to adduce. Then you need to explain why you have chosen your specific sources, any particular features and problems with them, and what you hope to derive from them. It is essential that the reader can understand how you have conducted your research. As with tutorial essays, you may wish to state your argument at the beginning, but it is not necessary to do so: if you have set up the topic in an intriguing fashion the reader will want to read on to find out the answer later.

The hallmark of a good thesis is precisely that it should contain a thesis, a consecutive argument or set of arguments in response to its questions. Historical evidence will not speak for itself and an argument will not emerge through the simple piling up of research material. Just as you should not turn off your brain during research, so you should not devote whole sections to the exposition of information without explaining its significance as you go along. Thus the substance of the discussion always encompasses both argument and the detailed evidence which drives it, set alongside each other. In this way the argument will constantly move forward, through a succession of hypotheses and arguments, always underpinned by the primary research which suggests the questions and, ideally, provides the answers.

A rousing conclusion is always a satisfying way to finish a sustained piece of writing. But you do not have words to waste on replicating your argument in detail; it should anyway have emerged clearly in your substantive chapters. If so, you will be able to use a brief conclusion to suggest ambiguities or twists, or to point forward towards the further research which this limited exercise has suggested. A good thesis will always lead onto further questions to be asked and hypotheses to be tested. Indeed, you may want to do this yourself in master’s or even doctoral research.

12,000 words will seem a daunting length at the outset: but most students ultimately find that they have written too much and need to make cuts in the later stages. Don’t, therefore, start off by over-writing in order to fill your wordage: try to be clear and concise from the start. It goes without saying that clarity is highly prized in historical writing, possibly even above elegance and verbal sophistication. The latter are certainly desirable qualities, but not at the expense of a clear and comprehensible argument.

Alongside clarity of exposition academics prize accurate and consistent technical presentation. Learning how to write footnotes and bibliographies correctly is part of the exercise of presenting a research thesis. Indeed, a high quality of analysis and argument is often matched by good presentation, and conversely, careless spelling, inconsistent punctuation and capitalization, inaccurate quotation of sources and inadequate referencing often combine with loose and directionless argumentation. There are also mark-penalties for failures in presentation and footnoting: see The Tariff of Penalties in General Appendix C and on this page of Canvas: https://canvas.ox.ac.uk/courses/21314 (Scroll down the page to find the document under the section ‘Thesis Submission’)

While, therefore, your timetable is tight and you cannot afford to finish research and to start writing too early, you must also ensure that you leave enough time for the final stages of revising your argument, clarifying your prose, and getting the technicalities right – not to mention mundane matters such as printing and binding. The submission-deadline is not flexible, and hasty final production can detract from a strong and interesting thesis.

Presentation and Referencing

Your thesis must be fully and accurately footnoted, and contain a bibliography of all the material used in its preparation. The Faculty’s guidelines on presentation and referencing can be found in two documents on the FHS Thesis section of Canvas ( https://canvas.ox.ac.uk/courses/21314): 

Formalities

Avoidance of plagiarism See section 2.2.1 below. Make sure you read and understand the rules of plagiarism as they are taken extremely seriously by the examiners and the Proctors.
Overlap
  1. Your thesis must not be substantially based on the same sources as are set for your Further or Special Subject.
  2. In answering questions on other papers in Finals you should not make substantial use of the material submitted in your thesis, with the exception of Disciplines of History.
Length

The thesis must not be longer than 12,000 words, including footnotes, but excluding bibliography. There are three exceptions to this limit.

  • Translations: when passages are quoted in a language other than English and an English translation provided, only the original quotation and not the translation should be counted towards the word limit.
  • Appendices: where you want to include some of your research material (e.g. tables, or short texts that are fundamental to the argument) without it counting towards the word-limit, you need specific permission from the Chair of Examiners. Requests should be made in good time, addressed to the Chair of Examiners via the History Undergraduate Office (undergraduate.office@history.ox.ac.uk). Please include a brief description of the content of the proposed appendix together with rationale for its inclusion, and some indication of size in word length.
  • Editions: a thesis may take the form of a critical edition of a text, in which case the regulations on word length in the Examination Regulations VI 10, sections iii and x, apply.
Format All theses must be uploaded as a single PDF file that includes title page, essays and bibliography. The main text should be double-spaced, footnotes and bibliography single spaced. Candidates should pay attention to the word-limit, as they will be penalized for exceeding it. Theses should have a title page, showing the title, candidate number, (but NOT name or college) the word-count of the thesis, and the referencing style used. The words in the title page and in the bibliography do not count towards the total word count, but everything else does, including footnotes. Candidates must NOT write their name ANYWHERE on the thesis. Thesis documents should be named in accordance with these conventions: Candidate number.course.paper number, (course is either HIST, AMH, HECO, HENG, HML or HPOL; the paper number for the main school History thesis is A10771S1).
Deadline All candidates must submit the PDF of their thesis, via Inspera, in accordance with the instructions that will be provided, not later than noon on Friday of Eighth Week of the Hilary Term of their final year. If you have reason for breaching this deadline you should apply through your college Senior Tutor to the Proctors; they will decide on the length of any extension in consultation with the Chair of the Examiners.
Authorship

Each thesis must be accompanied by a certificate, submitted by the candidate, making the following declaration in exactly the form indicated. Forms for this purpose are available to download from Canvas:

https://canvas.ox.ac.uk/courses/21314

Research Integrity

The University is committed to ensuring that its research involving human participants is conducted in a way that respects the dignity, rights, and welfare of participants, and minimises risk to participants, researchers, third parties, and to the University itself. All such research needs to be subject to appropriate ethical review. More information can be found at the Research Ethics website and an online training course can be accessed on  Canvas.

Central University Research Ethics Committee (CUREC)