Report and Bibliography Assignment
Purpose of the Assignment
The object
of this assignment is for you to choose a historian whose work falls within
the general area of the history of gender, race, and/or sexuality, and learn
as much as you can about the scholarly profile of a particular historian
in as short a time as possible.
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1)
You MUST NOT contact the historian her/himself (through email or any other
medium).
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2) You
SHOULD NOT try to go about this by collecting and reading all the historian's
written work. (This, I assure you, will take far too long). Instead, think
of this as a chance to practice your skills using the wide range of bibliographic
and reference sources available through Knight Library and its Janus on-line
system.
Deadlines
You must
sign up for a report due date in class on September 25th. You must be ready
to tell me the name of the historian you would like to report on in class
on October 9th.
Guidelines
for Preparing Your Report
Here's what you want to find out:
What is the academic position held by the historian you selected? In what
University and Department? What is her/his scholarly specialty? What are her/his
major book and article publications? What is she/he currently researching?
How have her/his ideas, questions, and research focus changed over the course
of her/his career? What can you conclude about her/his significance to scholarly
study in the history of gender, race, and/or sexuality?
Here
are some suggestions to get you started:
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The
easiest place to begin is with published works. Books will be listed in
any college or research library catalogue, but some libraries have much
more complete collections than others, so look for the broadest library
catalogue you can find and be sure its listings go back far enough to cover
the historian's entire career (for example, choose Worldcat or the Library
of Congress over the U of O catalogue).
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Lists
of recent articles are available through Janus databases such as ArticleFirst,
Carl Uncover, and Expanded Academic Index; to go further back (and for a
source that includes book reviews, too), try the reference database America:
History and Life. Use these (and other) sources to compile a basic bibliography
of books and articles, then move on to the more challenging questions. Information
you might usually neglect, such as the identifying notes about the authors
of articles published in academic journals, or the dust pages, acknowledgments,
and introductions of books, may help you determine which university faculty
a historian is part of and tell you something about their backgrounds and
research interests.
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Once
you can identify the historian's university, you can try using the internet
to find information on the department's home page. To get started, try using
Netscape to George Mason University's list of History Departments Around
the World (http://web.gmu.edu/departments/history/research/depts.html).
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Use
your imagination to think of other alternatives, too: try professional conference
programs, for example, or biographical sources.
After
you've collected the basic information, pull it into the following forms:
Make enough copies for
everyone in the class, and bring them to class to distribute on the day of your
report. Come to class with copies of your report and bibliography, and be prepared
to give a very short oral overview to the rest of the class while you distribute
your report.
Concentrate on the "big"
things: What is this person known for and why? What can you tell us about
this person that will help us understand her/his scholarly work better? Where
does this historian fit in the range of scholars writing on race, gender, and
sexuality?
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