I found this blog on Race-Class-Gender in History Dissertations which I think is very useful for those who wanted to get some rough ideas on what dissertation topic to work or perhaps those who wanted to know the most sought after topic in the world of dissertation writing. Check out the portion of the blog or you may follow the link below to read the entire article.
Inside
Higher Ed features
a somewhat
odd analysis about a study by the AHA comparing words in the titles of
dissertations that appeared between 1920 and 1960 with those that appeared in
the last 20 years. According to IHE's Scott Jaschik, "For the recent
titles, some of the analysis may challenge conventional wisdom about the state
of the disciplines. There has been much discussion in recent years from some
historians who say that issues of race, class and gender have come to dominate
history, at the expense of traditional studies of politics and war. But the new
AHA study found that 'war' appeared in 11 percent of dissertation titles and
'politics' appeared in 7.6 percent of titles. By contrast 'women' and 'gender'
appeared in 7.8 percent of the titles, and 'race,' 'ethnic' and 'ethnicity'
appeared in only 4.5 percent of the titles."
As
Jaschik points out, the statistics are clearly meaningful in one respect: the
decline of dissertations with France or England in the title suggests a
geographic shift away from Western Europe.
Regarding
subdisciplines, however, these statistics say little if anything. First, while it's
quite true that the race/class/gender paradigm extends everywhere
geographically, its focus has been on history of the United States. (It's hard
to imagine, for instance, issues of "race" appearing with much frequency in the
historiography of China.) While all large and many small universities make U.S.
history hires that are specific to the subfield/discipline, few schools do so
for any topics outside of the United States. Analyzing the percentage of
dissertations about Burmese history that contain the word "race" in the title
tells us little about the historiography of the United States.