Thesis

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MALS 79000:   Thesis Research (3 credits)

You should start planning your thesis halfway through the Liberal Studies Program (when you have close to 18 credits).  Ideally, it should focus the interests you have explored in your course work.  In the past, students have successfully developed a paper written for a course—or a couple of papers—into a thesis.

The thesis should be 50-60 pages long—in other words, as long as two or three term papers.  It is sometimes useful to think in terms of two or three chapters.

You should register for thesis credit only when you have completed the course work for the degree, or at least 24 credits.  Some students register for one course and the thesis in the final semester, and some register for the thesis only.

Notable recent theses successfully filed for the degree include the following:

• “Concourse Dreams: A Bronx Neighborhood and its Future,” by William A. Casari (2008)
• “Marginalized Modernisms East and West: A comparative Study of the May Fourth Movement and the Harlem Renaissance,” by Sara Rutkowski (2008)
• “National Identity and Japanese Horror Cinema,” by Mai Goto (2009)
• “Towards a New Theory of Commemoration: Memory and Place in the Changing City, A Preliminary Sketch of the Flushing Local Histories Project,” by Meral Agish (2010)
• “Coming Out: Schizophrenia as a Public Identity,” by Laura Starecheski (2010)
• “The Seventh Homeric Hymn to Dionysus in the Light of Heidegger’s Thought,” by Robert Farrell (2010)