The Invisible Research
Writing a dissertation is like doing daily exhaust sets.
A month and a half ago, I finished my doctoral dissertation. It is 305 pages long, references 200-odd books and articles, and contains archival images that have not seen the light of day since the nineteenth century. Scores more pages, hundreds more books and articles, and dozens more visual artifacts did not survive to the final version. More than anything, the strength of the finished document rests on this invisible research.
Real research—being dropped into the middle of a vast disciplinary expanse—requires ruthless editing to create a coherent product. I excised an entire chapter section on a particularly fascinating moment in nineteenth-century education. I delivered talks at conferences and seminars on research that simply did not, in the end, fit. I navigated e-mails from scholars after these talks, explaining that I couldn’t offer more: the topic did not facilitate my dissertation’s argument, and I simply would not have time to follow its particular thread beyond a footnote. This is the—harrowing, depleting, enervating, invigorating, life-giving—process of becoming an expert in a field.
Writing a dissertation teaches you how to write a dissertation: how to survey a field, explore and comprehend its facets efficiently, ask the right questions, plan and execute an immense project, research with a keen and careful eye, and write without writer's block. Perhaps most importantly, writing a dissertation is like doing daily exhaust sets; the process tones your critical faculties until, eventually, you can shut your laptop each evening confident that your mind will continue to labor on a knotty argument while you cook dinner, grab a drink, sleep. You know that you will return to work the next day with the fresh perspective that comes not only from respite but from a muscular brain.
Life is not a PhD: I will never write another dissertation, nor will I again have the luxury of spending months and years learning everything about something. The upshot of having written one is an ingrained tendency to inhabit knowledge rather than to use it as a backdrop. The invisible research does not need to be put on display, a list of "things I read" rather than "works cited." Evident in every word that I write even now, the exhaustive process of mastering a field transformed my cognitive approach to the world at large.
There are books and articles that discuss the proper amount of research—i.e., not too much—and they make important arguments. It is right not to use research as a procrastination tool or to feel crushed under the weight of human knowledge or to ascribe undue significance to quantity of information. It is also true that becoming an expert in a particular field changes how you look at everything else. Reading widely will make you an adept Renaissance man or woman; reading deeply will make you a critical force.
That excised chapter section still sits in exile on my laptop. The research involved in writing those pages colored the entire project’s argument, and I lamented pulling them out. Now those pages glow with the promise of future writing endeavors. Maybe they will become the first book.
