Humanities Research Paper Topics

The Humanities Are More Important

A week or so ago, I sat down with a recent graduate, a young woman named Rita, one of the most promising writers and thinkers I’ve encountered in over a decade of teaching. Rita's senior paper was on Bono, his global missionary work, and the culture of celebrity. I thought it was outstanding. We lingered over good coffee, and talked at length about her future. We spoke about the pressing, practical realities of the moment. But we also got excited about the prospect of the open road before her, the prospect of a life with infinite prospects and possibilities. I encouraged her to travel, to write, to think hard, to critique, and to give public voice to her critique. There is a profound richness in everything, I offered – even in the seemingly predictable life of a barista or waitress. No one knows what the future might bring, and no one can predict what sort of skills might be useful. Invest in your mind, I said, for the long term.

This, one might suppose, is old-fashioned advice given by a dying breed: the starry-eyed dreamer-professor who has been rendered increasingly irrelevant by the new matrix of instrumentalist, quasi-vocational, more-easily-assessed training that is ascendant in the universe of higher education. Everyone wants a degree that provides tangible skills for an immediate, $100K-a-year job, and it can be very difficult to draw a bright line between your abstractly analytical coursework in, let’s say, American studies and that shiny G5 airplane parked in front of the house featured on MTV’s "Cribs."

The job numbers are bleak. Our cityscapes are crumbling. The middle class is being erased. Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree? Is it right to ponder the rhythms of Shakespeare, or fritter away a semester thinking about the tones of El Greco, when the information superhighway needs further construction?

Kim Brooks, writing in Salon, seems to think that my student Rita was poorly served by her degree. The civic mission of the liberal arts may be inspiring, but such a mission "doesn’t pay the rent." Why, she wonders, "do even the best colleges fail so often at preparing kids for the world?" Why do we even offer such an antiquated degree structure, rooted in 19th-century certainties about the value of art and literature, and aimed at a more accelerated economy, where even a kid with an English B.A. might be able to get the proverbial job in advertising or in plastics, and get on with the business of life.

Research Paper Topic Ideas at Fulbright Scholarship

Some universities do allow students to suggest research topic ideas but it will not be a completely free choice. The Head of Faculty will need to be convinced that your ideas are relevant to the course and there is a suitably qualified tutor to supervise. This can rule out many topic ideas.

When choosing your research paper topic ideas, go online. Finding information on research paper ideas from the internet is relatively easy given the search capabilities now available. The more information available the easier it may appear but this is not always the case.

Research papers, by definition, must be based on research you do yourself. Sometimes research paper topic ideas are rejected because the research has already been done and too much information is available. Ideally basic background information should be available but information on the specific research paper should be limited.

When topic ideas there are a number of considerations that must be taken into account.

WHICH COLLEGE YEAR IS THE PAPER FOR?

In the first 2 years of college education it is common for an instructor or professor of a large class to assign a very general topics as opposed to specific topics. He or she could be reading 200 papers on the Gold Rush in California otherwise.

As a result you have more freedom to choose sub-topics and fresh, different approaches are welcome. Search for a sub-topic you are interested in and look for a fresh approach. At this level your tutors are not looking for original research but at how you gather and present your evidence.

In the third and final years of a first degree, and certainly if you are doing a higher degree, the research paper topics will be much more specific and will involve a progressively higher degree of original research.

In every case always go for something that you care about otherwise just the process of researching the idea will be a miserable experience for you. Your tutors will also be less than thrilled as your lack of interest is likely to result in a boring paper. For a tutor there’s nothing worse than having to read a large number of boring papers from disinterested students.

WHICH FORMAT WORKS BEST?

Think about the different formats or types of papers there are, and the different types that you have written. There are process papers, chronological studies, theories, surveys, discussion papers, papers that study the cause and effect(s) of an event or a behavior, papers that are arguments-including both the pro and con sides, and many more.

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