Orals Passed!

Whew! That was fun. Marion Deschmuk, Dina Copelman, and Sean Takats are great faculty to work with. And I would not have been able to do it without the mentoring of Steve Barnes this semester. Also, it wouldn’t be possible without the support of my wonderful wife Jessica, and the prayers and encouragement from family! Only two more hurdles to go, prospectus in December will put me at ABD (all but dissertation), and then the simple matter of research and writing a dissertation.

To finish off these posts about the orals, I’m posting some images of documents I made to help me conceptualize the books in their proper time periods. It’s basically back to the notecard system and arranging them chronologically. Each “card” has the title, a list of themes, a note about sources, and the main thesis of the book. This was extremely helpful in getting a grasp of the books. I created these in a Mac application called OmniGraffle. What would be even cooler, though, is if Zotero had a way to create this type of notecard type display with the ability to drag and drop the cards to organize in themes or chronologically.