Senior Capstone

All majors must complete a senior capstone project. Options for the capstone are 1. a thesis, 2. a critical translation, or 3. a creative project. All forms of the capstone involve careful research and application of skills developed throughout coursework taken (language competencies, critical thinking and writing, and literary/cultural analysis). More details on each of these options may be found below. In the spring semester of their senior year, majors register for RUSS400, the grade for which includes capstone work and the language exam, which consists of either an extended conversation in Russian on academic experiences at BMC or, if applicable, studying abroad or a translation of a text related to capstone project work.

You’ll work with several faculty members from the Russian Department, each fulfilling different roles. Your RUSS400 Instructor will be responsible for the administrative side of your capstone project: 1. they’ll help you create a timeline for the project and follow it, and 2. they’ll also make sure your capstone project fulfills all requirements. Your First Reader will be your primary adviser and, as such, will be guiding your project from the academic standpoint. Finally, your Second Reader will read and respond to your project in its finished form. 

First, you must submit a 500-word proposal for approval by the Russian Department faculty to begin work on your capstone. The topic you propose should be based on material you have already encountered in some way throughout your coursework; in other words, you should already have some understanding of the dimensions of the project and how to approach it.

The 500-word proposal must include:

1. your chosen topic
2. a brief description of how it builds upon coursework previously completed
3. at least three potential sources on which your project will be based

The proposal is due to the RUSS400 Instructor, Department Coordinator, and the Department Chair by the second Monday of November. After you receive department approval in early December, you’ll use this statement to start thinking seriously about your topic and be ready to begin work immediately at the start of the spring semester. 

The project itself should embody a substantial piece of analytical work (35-40 pages) or its equivalent (translation or project) and include at least five primary and secondary Russian-language sources (e.g., scholarship on the topic). You should establish your command of the scholarly state of the field as a background for your own excursion into it.

If you plan to double major and submit one double thesis, this thesis must be 50-60 pages, and you must receive approval from both departments. In other words, the thesis is the only option for double majors who wish to produce a single capstone project. All other Russian capstone requirements remain in place (e.g., sources).

During the spring semester, you’ll work with the RUSS400 Instructor and a faculty First Reader who will be selected based on your topic. In addition, you’ll be paired with a Second Reader when you have finished writing and are close to submitting the final version. You’ll meet with the RUSS400 Instructor regularly (as the two of you schedule this ad hoc) and with your First Reader (as the two of you schedule this ad hoc). The Second Reader will be consulted before the submission of the complete draft on the second Friday of April. After the submission of the final version of the project (Monday of the last week of classes), there will be a 45-minute Oral Defense with the two Readers and the RUSS400 Instructor. Defenses will be open to other BMC community members unless otherwise requested. Your RUSS400 grade will be determined by the two Readers with consultation from the RUSS400 Instructor based on the semester-long production of the project (timely meeting of deadlines, development of ideas, and so on), the project itself, and the oral defense, as well as the language exams.

Options

1. Thesis (35-40 pages): a critical, analytical research paper (“senior essay”) with a full bibliography. Students considering applying to graduate programs in Slavic Studies are encouraged to pursue this option.
2. Research-Based Creative Project (the equivalent of 35-40 pages): an open-format, self-designed, substantial creative project. May take a variety of forms, such as (but not limited to): a performance; a work of art or music that engages with Russian topics and themes; an exhibition of materials, zines, or podcasts related to Russia; a public outreach project; or a study of topics related to pedagogy. The final product must be accompanied by a Project Statement that includes discussion of the student’s artistic or creative purposes, as well as analysis of primary materials and models related to the project, all grounded in contemporary scholarship.
3. Critical Translation (Prose: 30-35 pages. Poetry: 15-20 pages. Both: 5-page critical introduction and analytical response to translation and process of producing it): a translation of a short story, novella, play, creative essay, or selections from a novel, etc. May not be a translation of an entire novel. Must engage with scholarship and theory of translation in some way.

All options require completion of the same materials and deadlines (e.g., annotated bibliography, portions of drafts, etc.).

Students who intend to pursue this option should keep the following guidelines in mind. In general, students should be aware that a creative project is likely to be as hard or harder than a traditional thesis paper. This is not an easier alternative to the thesis; in many ways, the self-directed and open-ended nature of such projects could make them more difficult and more time consuming to complete than a traditional thesis.

Guidelines

Your creative project is a research project. Students should expect to complete substantial reading in primary and secondary materials relevant to their chosen topic.

Your project should be significant but realistic in its scope. This is a work that you will be expected to produce over the course of a semester, as your work for a 400-level class; the creative work itself should thus likely be something that would take several dozen hours of work to complete. For a project that would take substantially more time than is feasible in a semester, students might aim to complete a sample, portion, or proposal of the project (e.g., a sample of a new textbook, a proposal or grant application for a public outreach project, a performance preview, etc.).

Students should ground their creative work in existing areas of expertise and experience. The faculty will make an effort to help students pursuing this option connect with resources and training on campus. Students should not, however, use the senior experience as a time to learn an entirely new creative form. If you have significant experience with weaving, for example, you could use this project to connect your weaving to the Russian world for the first time, but if you’ve never tried weaving before, the capstone is not the time to learn this skill.

Students will be required to contact additional faculty/staff at the College for consultation on their projects (e.g., Marianne Hansen in Special Collections, Bronwen Densmore at the Makerspace, or Allison Mills in College Archives). These persons will not serve an advisory role on the project but will help students navigate resources and provide some guidance in the early stages of planning. 

Students are expected to fulfill the same requirements as their peers completing the other options during the fall and spring semesters, such as annotated bibliographies, project proposals, drafts, etc. These assignments are meant to provide you with a space to develop your project. Depending on your medium/format, you might also be expected to submit additional low-stakes drafts/samples before submitting the final product. This will be determined in conversation with your First Reader and RUSS400 Instructor.

Evaluation and Requirements

Students’ creative projects will be evaluated primarily on the basis of the Project Statement. This statement:

• Should be 5,000-7,000 words
• Should include close readings and critical analysis of relevant scholarship and theory
• Should have the project’s interventions clearly stated and situated within broader scholarship
• Should explain its disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and creative approaches
• Should include a reflection on your creative process, your influences, your experimentation, and the trajectory of the work from its conceptualization to its production
• Should be highly polished, intellectually ambitious, and grounded in research, in the same ways that a traditional thesis would be (therefore, it should not be a lesser appendage to the work that can be tossed off at the last minute)

Assessment of the Artist’s Statement and final projects will focus primarily on:

• The project’s engagement with and awareness of models which inform its stylistic and structural integrity as well as its innovation
• The project’s grasp of its own historical and cultural situatedness, which can be demonstrated implicitly in the work itself or more explicitly in the accompanying statement to be submitted alongside the work
• The process of preliminary versions, drafts, models, appropriate to the medium
• The student’s engagement with and consideration of the critique and recommendations of drafts and models received from their Readers and RUSS400 Instructor
• The assessment of the technical elements of the work will focus primarily on the ways the Project Statement explains questions of form and production. In other words, students will not be assessed on mastery over a particular medium (e.g., their expertise in painting), though development of technical skills will be encouraged based on the individual’s existing knowledge and experience.

Students who intend to pursue this option should keep the following guidelines in mind. In general, students should be aware that a translation project is likely to be as hard or harder than a traditional thesis paper. This is not an easier alternative to the thesis paper; in many ways, the self-directed and open-ended nature of such projects could make them more difficult and more time consuming to complete than a traditional thesis.

Guidelines

Your translation project is a research project. Students should expect to complete substantial reading in primary and secondary materials relevant to their chosen topic.

Your project should be significant but realistic in its scope. This is a work that you will be expected to produce over the course of a semester, as your work for a 400-level class. For a translation of a prose text, that will equate to 30-35 pages. For a translation of a poetic text, that will equate to 15-20 pages. Both options must also include an additional 5,000-7,000-word critical introduction and analytical response to the translation and the process of producing it. You may not translate an entire novel, which far exceeds the limits of RUSS400. Your project must engage with scholarship and theory of translation in some way.

Students should ground their translation work in existing areas of expertise and experience. The faculty will make an effort to help students pursuing this option connect with resources and training on campus. Additionally, unless special permission is granted, students must have completed at least one course in translation, for example, Sibelan Forrester’s translation workshop at Swarthmore, to demonstrate their familiarity with and interest in translation work.

Students are expected to complete the same assignments as their peers completing the other options during the fall and spring semesters, such as annotated bibliographies, project proposals, drafts, etc. These assignments are meant to provide you with a space to develop your project.

Evaluation and Requirements

Students’ translation projects will be evaluated both on the basis of the work itself as well as the critical apparatus. This statement:

• Should be 5,000-7,000 words
• Should include dialogue with relevant scholarship and theory
• Should have the project’s interventions clearly stated
• Should explain its disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and creative approaches
• Should include a reflection on your creative process, your influences, your experimentation, and the trajectory of the work from its conceptualization to its production
• Should be highly polished, intellectually ambitious, and grounded in research, in the same ways that a traditional thesis would be (therefore, it should not be a lesser appendage to the work that can be tossed off at the last minute)

Assessment of the Translator’s Statement and final translations will focus primarily on:

• The project’s engagement with and awareness of models which inform its stylistic and structural integrity as well as its innovation
• The project’s grasp of its own historical and cultural situatedness, which can be demonstrated implicitly in the work itself or more explicitly in the accompanying statement to be submitted alongside the work
• The process of preliminary versions, drafts, and models, appropriate to the medium
• The student’s engagement with and consideration of the critique and recommendations received from their Readers and RUSS400 Instructor

What?

A short 500-word proposal (a statement of intent) about your project topic, the sources on which it will be based, and a brief description of how it builds upon work previously completed and/or courses previously taken is due by email to the RUSS400 Instructor, the Department Coordinator, and the Department Chair by the second Monday of November. After you receive department approval in early December, you will use this statement to start thinking seriously about your topic and be ready to begin work immediately at the start of spring semester.

How?

The Russian Department will evaluate the viability of your proposed project by considering the following questions: 

• Will the question or problem you intend to investigate work as a senior project? That is, is it a substantial problem, not trivial or obvious? Is it focused enough? Can it be explored and analyzed effectively in 35 to 40 pages and completed in one semester?
• Can you use the tools of analysis to which you’ve been introduced in other (Russian) courses? Which courses? Which components of these courses?
• Are you familiar enough with the works in question? Are you far enough along in your thinking for a one-semester project?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, we’ll ask you to refine your proposal before you begin. It therefore behooves you to begin early, to think deeply about your potential project, and to schedule brainstorming meetings with multiple faculty members.

Why?

• To demonstrate to your audience the viability of your project.
• To define the project for your capstone project.
• To locate yourself within the critical debate about your chosen topic.
• To identify how this project builds on previous coursework and your interests.

Your proposal, in other words, should help you crystallize your thinking, sharply define the problem you wish to address, and provide you with direction for the early stages of your investigation. A successful proposal will:

• Define the problem that makes this project important, even necessary; suggest why you want to pursue it.
• Explain how you will proceed: What is your strategy for addressing this problem and for clarifying its issues? What is your method or theoretical approach? It need not be a named school; it may simply be a focused close reading. Whatever method you choose, explain why it suits this problem.
• Give some indication of how far along you are in the project: How did you first encounter this topic? How does your project grow out of reading or writing you’ve already done or out of a course you've taken? What research has been done? Are any sources particularly relevant?
• Suggest what you hope to discover in writing the project; this may take the form of some tentative conclusions or a set of hypotheses that build on your current understanding of the problem.
• What are your next steps in research and writing?

You need not describe your sources in the proposal itself, unless your project involves a well-known critical debate or if you’ve learned something particular from a critic who applies the same analytic tools to similar texts.

As part of your proposal, you’re required to submit a preliminary bibliography that gives readers a sense of the scope of your research to date, and possible future directions. You should include both primary and secondary sources (in English and Russian), including texts that you will use to support the methodological or theoretical underpinnings of your project. You can also include some works that you have not yet read but that you think may be useful based on initial research.

Please keep in mind that your proposal is not a contract. Your project is likely to change, expand, or shrink in unexpected ways as your thinking and your research evolve. Your proposal, however, must stand on its own as a workable plan.

Sample Topics

• “The Politics of Adaptation: Yakov Protazanov’s Queen of Spades and Father Sergius in the Context of War and Revolution”
• “Eurasianism: Putin’s Guiding Doctrine: An Analysis of the Russian Eurasian Movement and Its Influence on Contemporary Russian Politics”
• “The Age of Apollo: Acmeism and the Journal Apollon”
• “Imagination and Fear in Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx”
• “‘I am a Citizen of the USSR’: The Artistic Progression of Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Impact of His Posthumous Canonization on Cultural Identity in the Soviet Union from 1930–1940”
• “Through the Looking Glass: Metafiction and Suicide in Nabokov’s Works”
• “Lorde’s Encounters in the USSR: Soviet Uses of Blackness”
• “To Live in Harmony: A Critical Analysis of Music in the Works of Dziga Vertov”
• “Commodification & Cultural Appropriation in The Firebird”
• “All About That Boy: The Significance of Christopher Robin in Winnie-the Pooh and the effects of His Absence in the Soviet Vinni Pukh”

Topics that were paired with other majors:

• “Political Science: The Evolution of Lysenkoism from the Stalin Era to Modern Russia”
• “The Evolution of Lysenkoism from the Stalin Era to Modern Russia”

The project should be 35-40 pages long (or its equivalent in the case of a creative project or translation), not including notes, bibliography and other apparatus. The text should be double spaced, and the typeface should be set in a readable, 12-point font such as Times New Roman. Margins should be 1" on all sides. Essays should conform to the guidelines for style and format in The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

The final draft of the essay should also include these elements:

1. Title Page
   1. Title (e.g., “Picking Gogol’s ‘Nose’: Body Imagery in Nikolai Gogol’s Short Stories”)
   2. Name
   3. Class
   4. Date
   5. for (name, First Reader)
   6. Department of Russian
   7. At the bottom of the title page: a precis, 100 words, summarizing the project.
2. Body of Essay
3. Notes
4. Bibliography

Response Process

Your First Reader will write their response to your project, as well as reflect on the semester as a whole, including timely completion of project deadlines. The Second Reader will offer their comments only on the final version of your project. You’ll receive both reports in full via email during Senior Week.

After you read through your reports, you’ll meet with your First and Second Readers for your oral defense at which they may ask additional questions about your work, process, and writing. This meeting will also be an opportunity to discuss any questions or responses you might have, as well as to think about how these reports can be useful for your future endeavors.

Oral Defense 

An oral defense of your project will be scheduled after you submit your capstone. You’ll meet with your First and Second Readers and the RUSS400 Instructor. The length of the defense will be no longer than one hour. You will be asked several questions about your project, your research and writing process, and possible topics for further development, including publication. In other words, this is a conversation where you get to share what you’ve learned and consider other angles. To prepare, take time in advance to think about what readers of your project might ask. 

Evaluation

You will receive one grade for RUSS400, which will reflect the grades given both by your First and Second Readers along with your Oral Defense and Russian Language Exam. If there is a great disparity between the responses of the First and Second Readers, the project will be provided to a Third Reader from the Russian Department or another subject-relevant department to resolve the difference; that reader offers only a grade evaluation and no comments.

The Russian Language Exam will be held during Exam Week. You will have a choice between 1. a conversation with two Russian Department faculty during which you’ll speak in Russian about your academic experiences at Bryn Mawr, your capstone project, and, if applicable, studying abroad or 2. a translation of a text related to the topic of your capstone project.