Senior Thesis: Histories of the Present

Perhaps the most terrifying part of senior year is writing a senior thesis.

Not everyone at Barnard has to write a thesis: some students will do research or some other type of capstone project and some students won’t have any specific senior project at all. When I declared my history major, I immediately started thinking about what I would eventually want to write my thesis about. I even had a Google document devoted to possible ideas. Every history class I took made me think of a new idea. 

All my ideas were abruptly overturned when the history department announced that there would be a new thesis track for my senior year. This track, called Histories of the Present, focuses on tying history to a contemporary issue. For the first half of the year, students on this track would write a paper giving historical context for a contemporary issue. In the spring semester, students would create a public history project intended for a broader audience, drawing on the research they had done in the last semester.

I knew immediately that I wanted to do this track: it emphasized my favorite part of studying history, which is using it to try to understand the present. There was also something immensely exciting about being the first cohort of students to do this type of senior project. Along the way, there have certainly been a lot of questions--among students in the track and our advisors alike--and a lot of trial and error, but it’s also been a lot of fun getting to talk about issues which are so relevant today and their roots or predecessors in history.

For my thesis, I chose to research citizenship regimes in Italy and the United States, which eventually turned into how Italian and American citizenship regimes today have been influenced by the imperial past. The topic held personal relevance to me as the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and it touched on fields of study I had found myself gravitating towards since my sophomore year.

I can’t always relate to the issues my other friends writing theses are dealing with, like needing a very specific primary source or having to grind out another chapter by next week, but working on my thesis has been a highlight of my senior year. In a year where I’ve found myself saying, “I would really like to stop living through historical events,” it’s also been a refreshing exercise in taking a step back and trying to understand how we got to the present.