Tufts Blogs

I’ve known for a long time that I would be doing a senior thesis at Tufts. I’m a religion major and I want to be a professor someday, which means that grad school is directly in my future. Since research and writing is essentially what I want to do for a living, and what I will be doing for the next 7-9 years in grad school, it only makes sense to start that process now. Even more important, this is my first chance to really try my hand at scholarship, to engage with a topic fully and examine it in great depth. So I decided to blog through the experience of writing a thesis, so you can see what it’s like to put a thesis project together in the humanities.

Of course, step one is choosing a topic. In some ways, this can be the hardest part of the process. Some people know exactly what they want to write about from their first or second year, but I was not one of those people. The professors in the religion department recommended that I pick a topic as soon as possible, so I could get started early, but I just wasn’t ready to choose a topic that would keep me interested for more than a year of work.

I’ve been spending this semester keeping my eyes open in all of my classes for topics that interest me. I was engaged by the discussion of women’s veiling and how it relates to religion in my Islam & Modernity class, and I enjoyed examining the interactions between gender and caste in my Modern Bengal class. But I didn’t find something that really grabbed my interest until my advisor asked me to proofread an essay he was looking to publish.

In this paper, he essentially challenged the term “reform” in terms of how scholars apply it to religious movements in colonial India. I have written on colonial reform in the past, and I realized I could connect this with my interest in gender studies, since reform movements in colonial India, and in the British colonial area in general, focused heavily on women.

So without further ado, here is my topic: I’m examining how colonial reform movements, both of the British and the native Indians, had essentially the same goals. They sought legitimacy, and the differences between the groups from which they sought legitimacy can help us to understand the movements and classify them. Furthermore, I want to examine how, although the movements often centered their reforms on women, women were generally not the actual audience of the reforms.

Coming up with a topic was a huge relief. But now, the real work begins. I’ll talk about that in a later post. Let me know if you have questions about theses or my topic in the comments!