1. Annotated Bibliography

Due: February 8th, 2024 (start of class)

Weight: 20% of final grade

Medium: Obsidian vault

Stream: All streams

The first assignment will be completed by all students as preparation for their future projects.

Your goal will be to identify a significant theme related to the course material (draw your inspiration from what you might hope to accomplish in assignments 2 and 3) and prepare a detailed annotated bibliography exploring roughly ten books and/or articles.

These bibliographies will be shared with the entire class as a joint Obsidian vault.

• A selection of a minimum of ten of the most foundational, intriguing (including outlying), or recent works (books and articles) on your chosen theme. Your goal should be to focus on secondary sources – to investigate how scholars have developed questions and answers, as well as how they may have suggested avenues for future research. Your bibliography can include texts from the course readings but these do not count towards the minimum ten works.

• Your bibliography should include both texts deemed foundational to the disciplinary area and some examples of recent scholarship. You will be evaluated on the texts you have chosen and whether you have identified appropriate key texts and recent works. All texts must be scholarly in nature unless a significant foundational text was not originally intended for a scholarly audience.

• For each book/essay, you will produce a short summary of each work and its significance. Your annotation should clearly indicate the book’s topic, scope, methodology and sources, argument, intervention, and relation to the broader sub-field. It should link to subsidiary reference/literature notes.

• At the head of your document, before the annotation of the individual works, you should provide a synthetic summary of the big trends, developments, questions, approaches, etc., within the history of the theme. This mini historiographic essay should not summarize all of the books again but should instead provide a big-picture overview of the development of your chosen topic.