This blog began as a place to reflect on the plethora of books and articles history doctoral students must read for comprehensive examinations. Somewhere in the middle of comps this blog became more about dissertation research and ideas that don’t fit in my current project since comps are one small, but stressful, part of doctoral work. Tomorrow I sit the first of four comp exams – three written and one oral exam for history at the University of Alberta . It has been a long year and a half getting to this point – changing topics will do that – but tomorrow at 9am the exam writing begins. For the written portion I have opted to write two exams in-house and one as a take home. The in-house exams are 3 hours closed book affairs (Monday and Wednesday) and the take home is a week of intense writing (Friday to Friday). Which means on January 28th the only remaining hoop to jump through will be the oral exam. When all of the exams are done and I can devote significantly more time to researching there will hopefully be more regular posts here. Until then, it is all about re-reading notes – which I really should get back to.
Ten Points for identifying what this picture is about.
Lauren Wheeler, Can Enviro Rock? 
I think its cheating if I say what it is. Good luck in your exams. I’m sure you’ll ace them.
True since you were in the class. But it is a pretty obscure Canadian historiography thing so not sure anyone else would get it.
you’ve mapped out some sort of spatial relationship about the historiography of environmental history and its relation to debates about liberalism…or something like that!
Very, very, close. Let’s just say it is all about the guy in the middle and a CHR article from 2000.
I am SO going to make my students draw diagrams like this on their comp. exams from now on.
I love the map. It’s like mapping out Canadian historiography as institutional boundary object. Where do you and your advisors fit in?
It is an illustration of the various connections between McKay and the critics of his liberal order framework in a collection of essays from 2006. Since the framework is intended to unity all of Canadian history and I don’t believe such a thing is possible in any history, don’t think there’s a place for me in the diagram. Except as a NiCHE person…