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Senior Thesis
The senior thesis represents the most sophisticated original research and writing that you will undertake as an undergraduate at Princeton. In many cases, the area and topic that you select will define the direction of your future professional career, and the relationship that you establish with your thesis adviser will be important for your admission to graduate and professional school and job placement. Even if you do not pursue a career in art history or archaeology, the skills that you develop in producing a thesis will be useful in writing reports, evaluating data, making policy evaluations, and so forth.
The most difficult task in writing a senior thesis is the selection of an appropriate topic. In general, you should not pick a topic in an area in which you have not had any coursework, but should try to pursue ideas, objects, or questions that piqued your interest in earlier courses. You might begin by thinking of your thesis as a question, ranging from the specific (why did medieval illuminators fill their borders with fantastic animals?) to the general (how does a society’s perception of time influence the kind of art that it makes?). You need to work with your adviser to narrow down your topic to a problem that you can assess in 60-80 pages and that you can research using the facilities available (whether libraries, archives, museums, or objects). Even though hundreds of pages may have already been written on your topic, you should remember that it is always possible to have new insights because each generation brings different perceptions and knowledge to past art.
If you have no idea of what you might want to write your thesis on, then you should schedule a meeting in the spring of the junior year with a faculty member and begin to brainstorm. The faculty member can help you probe what your real interests are or suggest approaches. In many cases, you may find that doing preliminary reading or visiting a museum may spark ideas.
Selecting an Adviser
You need to make an appointment with an adviser to discuss your potential topic and preliminary reading as soon as possible, but no later than September 28, 2007. By September 28, you must submit to the departmental representative the JP/Senior Thesis Adviser Form that lists your topic and has been signed by your adviser. Department of Art and Archaeology faculty normally do not direct more than three senior theses, so you may need to consult more than one faculty member in order to find a supervisor. In addition to full-time faculty, curators within the Princeton University Art Museum may serve as advisers if they so choose (they are not required to advise students). Normally faculty members in the Program in Visual Arts do not serve as advisers for Program One and Program Three theses. Full-time visiting faculty in the Department of Art and Archaeology may serve as senior theses advisers, but part-time faculty (teaching only one course) do not.
If you are having trouble finding an adviser, please notify the departmental representative, who will assign you an adviser. It is not always possible or necessary to have an adviser whose area of expertise coincides with your proposed thesis topic. What is important is that you find an adviser who seems interested in you and your topic.
Planning Your Time: The Fall Semester
During the fall semester, you must complete most of the research for your thesis, produce a chapter outline, gather the illustrations, and begin writing your first chapter (or more, if possible). This means that you have about two months to identify the relevant literature on your topic and digest it. You will need to do bibliographical searches for articles and in some cases request inter-library loans or visit museum collections. In short, you should count on spending about ten hours per week just on your thesis (probably more time than you would spend on a normal course). You should also schedule regular appointments with your adviser (the frequency varies, but ideally every two weeks you need to review your progress with your adviser).
By December 3, 2007, you must submit to your adviser a detailed outline of your chapters (normally 2-3 pages) and an annotated bibliography (approximately five pages total), which will be used to evaluate your first-semester work. Advisers will complete a fall semester Senior Thesis Progress Report that will be sent to the departmental representative by Dean’s Day (January 15).
Intersession and the Spring Semester
Concentrated writing of the thesis should continue during intersession and into February. In addition, you may need to do travel to collections and libraries during the winter recess or intersession. By the beginning of the spring semester (February 4, 2008), you should have submitted at least one chapter to your adviser, and by the end of February you will need to have largely completed your main text. Remember that your adviser needs at least a week (and in some cases two weeks) to read and comment on your text. If you know that you have difficulties with writing and organizing, then you need to complete a draft even earlier so that you can substantially rewrite. All theses will benefit by going through more than one draft.
The month of March should be spent editing and completing the footnotes, bibliography, and illustrations for your thesis. Please see the section below on Senior Thesis Format for details on the required style and mode of presentation. Please note that your thesis should not be longer than 100 pages (not counting the notes and bibliography), and in most cases should be between 60-80 pages.
Two copies of the thesis, one unbound in a temporary binder and one bound, are due in the departmental office by 5 p.m. on April 9, 2008. No extensions will be granted, and all materials (including illustrations) must be complete. The penalty for late submissions is one point subtracted from the final numerical grade for each day or part of a day that the thesis is overdue (including the weekends).
Thesis Evaluation
Your thesis is read and graded by your adviser and a second reader assigned by the department (the list of second readers is not made public until the thesis due date). The final thesis grade is the average of the two readers’ grades (except when their grades are more than ten points apart, in which case the department assigns a third reader and the final grade is the average of the three grades). The two readers’ reports and the final thesis grade are given to the student at the senior oral exam.
The department forwards the unbound copy of the thesis to the Princeton University Archives in Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library for microfilming and returns the bound copy to you. You also receive written reports from your two readers, and some readers may give you informal comments that respond in more detail to editing, stylistic, and conceptual strengths and weaknesses within your text.
Guidelines for Thesis Preparation and Style
General Format: Your thesis must be printed in black ink on plain, 8 ½ x 11” white paper. Use only one side of the paper and select a 12-point font (Times New Roman and Courier are the most common). The text must be double-spaced with paragraphs clearly indented and with reasonable margins (1” on the right, top and bottom and 1 ½” on the left should be adequate). Inset quotations and footnotes may be single-spaced. Do not break words at the end of lines or justify the right-hand margin. Pages should be numbered (including endnote pages), but the illustration pages at the end of the thesis should not be.
Order and Format of Thesis Sections
See this PDF for an example of a thesis title page.
Pledge: On a separate page after the title page you should pledge that “This thesis represents my own work in accordance with University regulations” and sign your name. Below that, a paragraph should read: “I authorize Princeton University to reproduce this thesis by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purposes of scholarly research” and then sign your name.
Table of Contents: List chapter titles and sections, endnotes, bibliography, and their beginning page numbers.
Acknowledgements or preface (optional): You may thank any individuals or institutions for their assistance or permission to consult archives and works of art.
Main text divided into chapters: You should begin with an introductory chapter that may have a separate title or merely be called “Introduction.” Within each chapter, you may choose to have subdivisions with separate titles, but you should avoid having short, choppy sections. You should also have a separate chapter that functions as a conclusion (and it normally needs to be more than 2-3 pages).
Appendices (optional): If you are publishing archival materials, letters, or datasets in their entirety, then they appear as appendices.
Endnotes: Most professional manuscripts and books in art history now use endnotes rather than footnotes. Endnotes should be clearly divided by chapters and should recommence with each chapter (rather than running through the entirety of the thesis). For the style of footnotes or endnotes, see the Department of Art and Archaeology Style Sheet or the section on the Chicago Manual style in Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual or Sylvan Barnet’s A Short Guide to Writing about Art. Please note that different disciplines and nationalities use different note styles. To be consistent, we would recommend using the Chicago Manual style or the variation of it used by the Art Bulletin, the journal of the College Art Association (detailed in Barnet). Your adviser may also ask you to use a different style. Whatever style you use, you must be consistent in formatting and punctuation throughout the document. Pay particular attention to information obtained from the Web: you must record not only the URL of the site, but the date that you consulted it, the author or sponsor of the information (if there is no specific author), and the title of the posting.
Bibliography: List all sources quoted and consulted in alphabetical order by last name of author. For the format for your bibliography, see the Department of Art and Archaeology Style Sheet , Hacker, or Barnet.
List of Illustrations: Each illustration listed should contain the following information: first and last name of creator (artist, architect, designer, if known); title (in italics and in English translation unless the work is best known under a foreign title); collection, portfolio, book, or manuscript ID in which a particular image originally appeared (for illustrated books, codices, prints, photographs, and other objects that are fragments or parts of a larger, coherent whole); date (to the extent known; use ca. instead of c. for approximate dates); medium (“oil on canvas”; “etching”; “granite”; but not “sculpture”, “painting”); size (optional; many books no longer list the sizes of objects); collection where the work is currently located. Then in parentheses put (Photo: Source from which you obtained the image). If you Xeroxed or scanned the image from a published book or magazine, then you must list the author, title, place of publication, publisher, date, and plate or page number from the book (use the format for bibliographical references). If you downloaded the image from the web, you should list the web address using the bibliographical style for websites (see the section of this document on Bibliography). If the website does not have all the appropriate ID information for the image (particularly the current owner of the image), then you need to consult collection catalogues and books. If you purchased the photograph, list the agency or museum that sold you the image. If you shot the picture yourself from the original object, then put: (Photo: The Author). If you have questions about the captions for illustrations (which vary enormously in style), you can consult any general textbook or university press publication for models. The important thing is to be consistent for all your illustrations.
Illustrations: You do not need to repeat the credit information on the actual Xeroxes or scans of illustrations, but you must print (or type) their figure numbers. If you are scanning the illustrations, you can paste and copy in the ID illustration from the list of illustrations. You may use black and white or color reproductions for the illustrations; do not submit original photographs or drawings.
Quotations: Use quotations sparingly, keep them brief, and work them as much as possible into the flow of your own narrative. If a long quotation (five or more lines) must be used, take it out of the body of the text, indent, and single-space. Within the quotation, follow the punctuation and paragraph structure of the original text. If you select a part of a quotation (starting in the middle of a sentence, cutting off the end of the phrase, or deleting words in the middle), you must insert an ellipses, or three spaced periods ( . . . ) at the point of each deletion. Also, if you need to insert your own words to clarify a quotation or make it grammatically correct, include them within brackets. For example, the author of this handbook said that “if you need to insert your own words … , [you must] include them within brackets.”
A quotation must adhere in all ways to the original text. If you are borrowing a quotation from another secondary source that quoted it from an “original” manuscript or another book, then you need to indicate in your footnote that you got the citation as cited in the secondary source (if there is an error in the translation from the original to the secondary source, then it is not presumably your fault). Your note would read: Frank Lloyd Wright, The Solomon Guggenheim Museum (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 20; quoted in William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1976), 4:348. If possible, it is always advisable to consult the original source for a quotation in order to get a better sense of its context. If there is a spelling or grammatical error in a quotation that you recognize, then you add the Latin word sic in brackets [sic] to indicate that the error was in the original.
Thesis Writing Workshop
The Department and Dean’s Office sponsor a senior thesis writing workshop taught by an advanced graduate student in the Department. The workshop leader arranges regular meeting times so that you can review various aspects of the research, outlining, and writing processes. Do not feel that you do not need to attend the thesis workshops if you are not having difficulties: all students benefit from the advice and group discussions generated in the sessions. Workshops will consider common issues such as budgeting time for writing, writer’s block, plagiarism, organizing your notes, limiting your topic, locating sources and images, preparing the final manuscript, and so forth.
