Jonathan Warren, who recently finished his Ph.D. in the History of Christianity at Vanderbilt University, reflects upon what he learned from writing his dissertation. Thank-you Jonathan!Read more…

The most traumatic (and memorable) experience I had in this regard was of writing a paper on Thomas Hobbes for a “Theodicy in the Western Traditions” seminar. I had never read Hobbes before, so I read all ten volumes in the Molesworth edition of Hobbes’s English Works and over thirty secondary sources on Hobbes’s thought before I wrote a single sentence in Microsoft Word.Read more…

Dissertations require lots of basic life skills that other people seem to come by natively, things like the ability to keep a neat desktop, organize and retrieve random bits of paper on which important details are written, spend a number of hours consecutively researching the same topic instead of veering off into social media or other – vastly more fascinating – research topics. Read more…

For the past three years, I’ve been trying to write a dissertation, which is more or less like trying to write a book–but for three or four very persnickety readers. Read more…