This guide was developed to help graduate students develop proposals and prospectuses. It was originally designed with Ph.D. dissertation proposals in mind but could be adapted for M.A. proposals.

This entry examines the elasticity of the term “archive” and the tensions that surround its ever-expanding usage as a keyword across disciplines. As a term that connotes a place, a practice, a profession, and, with the archival turn, a metaphor, archive/s offers an opportunity to think across the institutional contexts that define the work of sch…[Read more]

This essay places at the center of twentieth-century African American knowledge production the librarians and collectors who mapped blackness as a capacious site of inquiry in the decades before Black Studies. Between 1900 and 1950, they created infrastructures for inquiry into black history and culture through the production of bibliographies,…[Read more]

Entering Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one still passes through the “catalog room,” an antechamber filled with rows of card drawers. Inaugurated in 1930 by librarian Dorothy Porter, this catalog of the “Negro Collection” served for much of the twentieth century as one of the only extant portals to African American…[Read more]

Non-sentient animals have appeared in the Star Wars universe in roles both integral and decorative since A New Hope premiered in 1977. From beasts of burden like the dewbacks and banthas of Tatooine and the Gungans’ kaadu, to monsters like the wampa, rathtar, and dianoga; to the myriad of critters large and small that inhabit interstellar e…[Read more]