One of the most basic skills of academic research is choosing a topic. It’s something you learn early (even in middle school) and practice often, but it can remain a challenge, even after you’ve supposedly mastered it several times over. Over the course of grad school, I learned that this has a lot to do with the fact that it’s only at the end of a project that you can appreciate the peculiar advantages and challenges of your topic in the way you’d ideally be able to do at the outset of your research. Since I’m at the end of the dissertation as a project (and after this will be considering how to tweak the topic as I work toward a book), I wanted to capture this moment of relative clarity, at least for my own sake.

Most people, I think, tend to choose research topics that are too broad, and so a lot of attention goes into “narrowing” down a topic. Developing a dissertation topic is a peculiar challenge insofar as the end-product (a dissertation) is generally much larger than anything the writer has produced up to that point, and the emphasis on making an argument of some significance to the scholarly community is also greater. The problem, then, is keeping your topic narrow without making it overly shallow or limiting the relevance of your potential findings.

There are a variety of ways to frame the narrowness or breadth of a research topic. Three that are basic to me are space, time, and theme—or, when? where? and what? Of course, two other questions deserve mention: how? (the methods you are using to conduct your research) and why? (the reasons that research is valuable). The “why?” question is intimately related to the topic but is a bit more “meta” in scope. You’ll start with a preliminary “why?”—why is it worthwhile to do this research?—but eventually you’ll need to answer the slightly different question, “Why should anyone want to read what I’ve written?” “How?” can actually be part of the answer to “what?”  if, for example, you are conducting research on a specific text or kind of document. (Likewise, “how?” can also answer “why?” since the methods you develop may be of use to other researchers.)

In theory, the advantage of my dissertation topic was that the “where?”-dimension was pretty narrow—a single city. In contrast, the “when?”- and “what?”-dimensions were quite broad: the dissertation covered a few hundred years and a wide range of topics (both of which were tied together by the overarching “why?” that drove the dissertation’s argument). I expected the benefits and disadvantages of a narrow “where?” and broad “when?” and “what?” to balance against each other, and to some extent I was right. However, researching a single place wasn’t as simple as it might sound or quite as much of an advantage as I anticipated. In fact, I had to spend a lot of time sifting through through materials on larger geographic units (mostly the province) to find information relevant to the one city I was interested in. Of course, this wasn’t just an inconvenience—one thing I came away with was a sense of the importance of that city’s connections to other places.

I think that having a more capacious thematic (“what?”) approach was the most challenging aspect of the way I framed my dissertation topic. It wasn’t too bad in terms of finding primary sources because I wasn’t working with a particularly rich or consolidated set of archives. Piecing together different kinds of sources on distinct but related topics produced some really good results that I wouldn’t have been able to achieve with a narrower focus.

There were some significant drawbacks, though. The range of specific themes I dealt with across my chapters pulled me into a similarly wide array of existing scholarship. Even when themes recurred across chapters (e.g. educational institutions), talking about them in different time periods (e.g. 18th century and early 20th century) meant dealing with distinct sets of literature about them. As a result, I had to balance between engaging with these smaller sets of scholarship as deeply as possible and actually getting the dissertation done and also explaining my contribution to scholarship on these topics without losing sight of the dissertation’s larger argument.

Another challenge I have encountered is describing the project (succinctly) to people who are unfamiliar not only with it but my field as a whole. It’s not too hard for historians of China to pick up on how my project addresses problems they have at least some familiarity with. However, these gestures can be lost on historians outside of my particular field, who are also unlikely to have any familiarity with the place I study or the warp and weft of the time period I cover. My narrow “where?” focus doesn’t help too much here because most people aren’t familiar with Jinan, and explaining what it is and why it’s worth caring about also take up time (in conversation) or space (in a cover letter).

Some days I wish I had chosen a topic that might have been less difficult in these regards. The grass is always greener on the other side of the carrel. Every project has its own challenges, and every scholar has their own capacities that enable them to deal with these challenges and explain why what they study is valuable to people outside their particular specialty. That’s not to say that you should ignore the peculiar challenges of a given topic—all the more since what would have been relative inconveniences a few months ago could now pose insurmountable problems. Just because it’s impossible to really understand all the pros and cons of a given topic until your research and writing is well under way doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile to think through what the biggest challenges you are likely to face are. Being overly pessimistic is a good way to get nothing done. But if you’re overly optimistic and assume that things will just “work out,” you run the risk of encountering even more unexpected roadblocks, which are, in my experience, the worst kind.