This course is designed to give general support to those graduate students grappling with the problems of organizing their archival materials, shaping their projects into finished dissertation form, and developing the writing strategies most suited for this process. Students freshly back from the archives or a year further along are the primary constituency, although there is no objection to participation from those who are more advanced. This course is seen as an excellent means of overcoming some of the anxieties accompanying the return from the archives, and the relative isolation many students may experience during the unnecessarily lonely struggle with the writing stage of the dissertation.

A primary goal of this course is for participants to produce one or two chapters of the dissertation in a more structured setting, while reading and discussing the work of other graduate students in the fourth or fifth year of the program and receiving their feedback on your work as well. The dissertation writing seminar can provide useful feedback on dissertation work from a broader range of expertise and methodological points of view than normally encompassed in a dissertation committee. The colloquium also should create an intellectual forum that brings together graduate students in disparate fields, in order to encourage cross-field dialogue and consequent broadening of horizons.