Friday, June 12, 2009

News (used to be a plural)

News item #1: My panel got accepted to the RSA conference! Yay! Now I just have to convince my parents or brothers or close friends to travel with us to help out with child care. Oh, and write a paper.

News item #2: I turned in my prospectus draft. And boy, is it a draft. No citations. Bracketed notes to myself all over the place about what I still need to write. Each "chapter" section in a different form and style. But it's turned in. My next step is to put together a working bibliography by the end of the month.

News item #3: Next up, working on writing the RSA conference paper, which will get me started on the reading and research for my Faerie Queene chapter. I'd love to have a solid draft by the end of the sumer.

How's the summer shaping up for you?

2 comments:

Good Enough Woman said...

Awesome! I'm impressed by your productivity, and HOORAY on the conference paper. And, so, what all does your prospectus include? Is it like abstracts of the chapters?

Amstr said...

I ended up treating the prospectus kind of like a scientific paper outline: Intro, Method, Historical/Social Context, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Conclusion. Some sections are full of questions I want to ask of the texts, others include preliminary arguments or relevant sections of the texts, etc. It's definitely outline-driven. Some sections are sort of abstracts of chapters, but some are more free-form. At this point, it's a document that has some shape and organization and has something written in every section. I expect to revise it a few times before it's "official," and I'll likely wait to revise until I've done more work and have a better idea of where I'm really heading with the dissertation.