Objectives:

The goal of this class is to prepare students to conduct an independent research project, especially a senior thesis. Students will work on their own research throughout the course of the class, and face intermediate deadlines in developing a literature review and research plan. This will hopefully position senior thesis students well to conduct a research project or write an analytical paper in the spring.

Independent study students may accelerate that process and actually conduct and write up research during the course of the class. A less instrumental goal of the class is to teach them to think of political science as a scientific discipline and community of scholars. We will emphasize the importance of building upon and reacting critically to previous research.

The class will be run in a seminar format, and will incorporate discussion of student work on a regular basis. There will be assigned readings. Readings in the first half of the class will pair classic works on a variety of topics in political science, international relations, and political theory that build upon or critique each other, to emphasize the importance of the exchange of ideas to the scholarly enterprise.

Readings in the second half of the class will deal with research design and advanced methods, as appropriate to the types of research students are doing.