Model bibliographic essay revision 1

Your Final Bibliographic Essay (6-7 pages, 20% of your grade, due on the final day of class, 5/13) will be built on three earlier bibliographic essays (each worth 10% of your grade):

1. Get approval for your 2-3 sources (due: 2/12)
2. the draft (2-3 pages, due: 2/24) 2-3 peer-reviewed articles/book chapters 
3. revision 1 (3-4 pages, due: 3/23) an additional 2-3 peer-reviewed articles/book chapters so now your paper will have a total of 4-6 sources and your edited paper should now have a more developed argument that includes all of these sources. Do not just add a narrative about these 2-3 new sources to the back of the first draft. Please revise your paper to make a cogent argument about all the sources thus far.

Your final essay (6-7 pages; due: 5/13) must include an additional 3 peer-reviewed articles/book chapters, so now your paper will have a total of 6-7 sources and have a fully developed argument that includes all of your sources from your first draft through this final version. Since this assignment is partly intended to have you see the ways scholars are in dialogue with one another, please strive not to choose more than one source by the same author. 

A bibliographic essay is a narrative review of the literature on a particular topic. For this course, your bibliographic essay must be related to gender and/or sexuality (marriage, rape, midwifery, transgenderism, homosexuality, queer, childrearing, domestic violence, etc.) or a topic that you will apply to a particular community that we focus on in class (the queer experience, female insurgents, transgenderism, etc.). You will examine the literature on the topic for the time periods covered in each unit. Each essay (draft, revision 1, revision 2) will build on the previous one and culminate in the final bibliographic essay. Therefore, it is important that you submit all earlier versions on time so that I have enough time to comment on them and so that you can take that feedback into account when revising each successive paper. Do not hand all your papers in at the same time. This defeats the purpose of this scaffolded assignment and it will result in a poor grade.

So, for example, let’s say that you choose marriage as your topic. Your:

• draft should cover works that relate to marriage in the pre-Columbian and early colonial period (pre-1492 through late 16th century) since that is what we covered in Unit 1. If our contemporary understanding of your topic – in this case, marriage – was different in pre-Columbian times, you may include works that discuss other types of relevant relationships.
• revision 1 should be a revision of your draft which also incorporates the literature on marriage during the late colonial through independence periods (roughly 1600-1899)
• revision 2 will be an update of revision 1 which incorporates the literature on marriage after independence (roughly 1900-1960s)
• The final essay should cover through the late 1980s (although I will accept works that cover up to 2000 as well).

Note: The time periods referenced above have nothing to do with when the works you choose were published. The works you choose should not be written during those time periods, since that would make them primary sources. Your works should be secondary sources written by contemporary scholars. You are developing an interpretation of the secondary literature written by contemporary historians.

While I encourage you to reference popular writings in your narrative, your main analysis must be limited to scholarly literature (peer reviewed articles and book chapters). For each essay, you should analyze about 2-3 peer reviewed articles and/or book chapters. Your final essay should analyze 8-12 peer reviewed articles and/or book chapters. 

You should go beyond summarization and analyze each work by comparing, contrasting, and evaluating the relationships between them. With each successive essay, you should become more of an expert on the extant literature on your topic. For each successive essay, you should incorporate and compare, contrast, evaluate the new sources for the period covered in that unit. In the process, you will develop an interpretation about the literature on your topic and this should be how you frame your entire essay. 

The following questions will help guide you in analyzing your sources and writing your paper:

• What is the author’s focus? What is their argument? What is their conclusion?
• What kinds of information or documentation is the author using as support?
• What assumptions does the author make or question?
• What are the problems, issues, and points of contention or debate?
• What does the author leave out? Why?
• Do these sources all reference another specific source? If so, why is that source important? (If everyone you read references a specific source, you should include that as one of the sources in your bibliography, even if it covers a different topic or time period.)
• Do your sources reference each other? How does each source relate to the other sources in your bibliography? Does one source build upon another? Or does it contest another? How do these connections either limit or expand upon the literature on  your topic? 
• Your revised essays and final essays should trace the changes in the literature on your topic over time and here I do not mean the chronological time period (colonial, independence, modern, etc.) but rather, how scholars writing in different time periods (1950s, 1980s, 2000) have addressed your topic. Do more contemporary scholars have different concerns than scholars writing in the 1960s? Do you see any trends in the scholarship?
• What is missing from the literature on your topic? What would you like to see scholars researching and publishing about?

As you can see based on these questions, you are not writing a typical research paper summarizing or analyzing a topic from one single time period. I am asking you to write more of a literature review that covers different time periods. It’s actually more of a historiographic essay. So, you’ve found me out. I’ve tricked you into writing a historiography. But it is still broader than that since I do not want you to stick to one time period or event. I want you to cover the literature in different periods because this will help you with the role play assignment.

How do I get started?

 

1. Search the library catalog, OneSearch, other CCNY Libraries databases, and – if you are still not finding enough – Google Scholar for peer-reviewed articles and/or book chapters on your topic. Make sure that there is sufficient literature on your topic for all the time periods we cover. If there isn’t, you won’t have enough to write your essay, so you should revise/reframe your topic. If you forget where or how to search or need help narrowing down or reframing your topic, contact Prof. Domínguez. 

 

2. Skim, decide, then read closely. Once you have found a peer reviewed article, make sure that it addresses your topic by reading the abstract and skimming the article. If it looks promising, carefully read the article and decide whether to use it in your essay. You will not typically find an abstract for online book chapters found on OneSearch, so you will need to skim those. If you come across entire books that look promising, look up book reviews (on the Internet or via CCNY Libraries databases) and use the book’s table of contents and index to choose the best chapter to use in your essay. If you learn anything from non-peer reviewed readings of any kind or from peer reviewed articles that you ultimately decide not to use, please still feel free to reference those in your essay and/or in footnotes or bibliography. However, do not spend too much time analyzing those. Use this assignment to become an expert on your topic. Imagine that by the end of the semester, you can attend the American Historical Association conference and have a meaningful conversation about your topic with a scholar who is well versed on it as well. During your conversation, you may reference peer reviewed articles, but also any other type of literature on your topic, both good and bad. So, read as much as you can about your topic; not just what you will use as the main sources.

Resources

Sexuality (Database: World Scholar Latin America & the Caribbean )