I’m about to start graduate school for the third time. I did a MA in history and two years in a history Ph.D before landing in the American Studies program at UT Austin. As I gear up for another year in coursework (very excited, to be honest), I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve read (and haven’t read) in my previous courses. After some soul searching and social media responses to the query, I’ve found that their are many different kinds of works graduate students (and former graduate students) wish they had read.
Interestingly, many of the cited authors and genres fell into either the theoretical or the very technical. Others wished they had read more of the foundational titles in their field. Even more wished their had been more inclusion of works by women, people of color, and other minority groups.
As someone with interests in feminist and critical theory, as well as in public history, I related to all of this. What follows is a list of what I, and others on social media, wish they had read in graduate school.
- The classics of the field. This will, of course, vary greatly depending on your specific sub-discipline. But for me, as someone who does Southern and African American intellectual history, it would include old school historians like C. Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin, and even Eugene Genovese. These historians are cited everywhere and of course, I’ve soaked up a lot of their influence and arguments through other work, but I wish I had read more of them in class or early in my career.
- A ton of people mentioned theory, particularly Marx’s Capital Vol 1 and Foucault, both of which are cited everywhere but nobody seems to teach, at least where I have been taking courses. If you assume your students have read or are familiar with a certain theorist step back and realize they probably aren’t.
- Popular history. Those with history backgrounds pointed to popular histories should be more widely read in graduate seminars. Why are these books appealing? What can historians and other academics take from their approaches? A lot of the avoidance is based in a kind of snobbishness, but it robs students of the chance to engage what people are reading.
- Particularly for those who got involved in public history and the public humanities, practical guides were mentioned. Strictly practical guides to curation and exhibit design, oral history, and historic preservation are often skipped over for monographs, even in public history centric courses.
It seems then, that what we wish we had read, was a bit more of everything foundational-the big name popular historians, the how-to guides, the classics of the field, and the foundational theorists. These are works that it’s easy to assume people have read. As you head back to school, what books do you wish you read?
2 Thoughts on this Post
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Thanks so much for this post, Holly!
I wish I had read more primary sources during coursework, so that I could have experienced them with other graduate students. It is certainly valuable to learn how to unpack the art and craft of a monograph–how it was made, how it ought to have been made–but in retrospect, the most valuable classroom experiences occurred when a primary source was on the table, rather than a recent scholarly work.
Thanks Holly!
I agree that there is a significant amount of assumption regarding what grad students will have covered by the time they entered graduate studies and that a well curated readings course (or perhaps group) would be beneficial. One thing that we covered in an undergraduate course, but not in graduate school was not only reading and understanding “classics” as scholarship, but also how to treat secondary and even tertiary sources in academic fields as historical primary sources in their own right for analysis. This linkage was particularly important as it was discussed in part through the lens of shifting and reduced production costs and their impact on scholarly quality.