Share your Focus and Dissertation Thesis

[JD2PHD]

Hello all. I am interested in seeing how narrowed in the average focus and dissertation thesis is. Would anyone here like to share there own? I'm also just generally curious about learning about the various subjects everyone finds to be very interesting. 

 

If you don't want to share that information about yourself, perhaps one of your colleagues has an interesting focus you'd like to share.

[czesc]

I'm not exactly at dissertation stage yet so I can't really help you with my own focus, but information about dissertations in progress is often available on department websites. See, e.g., http://history.arts.cornell.edu/graduate-students-dissinprogress.php

[Riotbeard]

My dissertation considers the relationship between antebellum U.S. racial science and medical theory, focusing on how theories of race are dipsersed through medical education.  It looks at the braided evolution of materialist conceptions of life and bodies altered by the rise of pathological anatomy and a biodetermined conception of race before evolutionionary theory.  I use three different medical schools (from different regions) as case studies to explore these questions with a particular focus on student writing.

[kotov]

Digging up an ancient thread here, but figured OP wouldn't mind since it didn't get many replies the first time around. My dissertation is on Jewish forced labor in Romania during WWII. The main questions I'm looking at are how the Antonescu regime (specifically the Army General Staff) balanced economic rationality and productivity versus racial ideology in the organization of the system and deployment of workers, and the role that forced labor played within the regime's overall policy toward the country's Jews. Most of my material is from the archives of the Romanian Ministry of National Defense and from the Military Cabinet of the Council of Ministers, but I'm also looking at the reports created by the commanders of labor camps and detachments, as well as oral testimonies of people who worked as forced laborers in Romania during this period.

 

In the bigger picture, I'm trying to basically fill in a hole in the historiography of the Holocaust in Romania, as well as to provide another case for comparison in terms of the broader history of Jewish forced labor during the Holocaust; I actually think my results are pretty significant in the latter respect, as the system in Romania was organized similarly to the labor service system in Hungary, but the outcomes for the workers were very different.

 

Please, interrogate further, I'm a total narcissist and love talking about my work.