woes . . .

It seems that now is the time when the grad students are bemoaning the task of deciding upon a dissertation topic. Doug and Pete (and I think someone else as well, but who that was escapes me) have weighed in, so I thought I lend my voice to the matter. Yes, I realize that unlike these two, I'm at least two years away from having to decide, but I'm too much of long-range planner to wait that long . . .

Doug's major conundrum is that there's really nothing new to do in biblical studies . . . to be frank, that was one of the reasons I moved away from biblical stuff to Assyriology, Sumerian in particular. I've often missed the whole "fixed corpus" aspect of studying HB, but the big drawback is that modern academia has had a couple hundred years to pore over that relatively small data set. Assyriology, by way of contrast, is a much younger field, with far more texts, geography, history, etc. That means that, in theory, there's a lot more to do. Of course, since biblical studies is replete with secondary literature there is much to draw on (of course, that makes the bibliography review more difficult) . . . in Assyriology, depending on the topic, there might be very little previous research even in the general vicinity.

Pete's big gripe seems to be deciding upon something chic and sexy that will keep his interest for that long and tedious haul . . . or at least something that "would give me a niche and propel my research for the next decade or so." I think every graduate student hopes for that riveting topic that captivates both themselves and the entire field . . . the dissertation that scholars immediately demand be published and launches the student into a tenure-track position at a research institution.

I'm personally caught between wanting to do a topic that I personally would find interesting or at least novel or doing a topic that the field really needs. My advisor has suggested two topics to me, both of which are glaring holes in the field. One is strictly grammatical that would, frankly, be very tedious. The other deals with a set of texts that even my advisor (yes, the guy who does lexical texts) thinks they're really boring.

I think the thing about the dissertation is that (hopefully) it's not the end of your academic career . . . it's the beginning. In my case, if I can be a leading authority on even one of these minor points, no matter how "boring," that everyone would reference, then that may well be more important for my career than doing an extremely interesting (to me) linguistic topic that most Assyriologists would hate to read. Hopefully, doing the "more necessary" topic would allow me to have a long career during which I could do those linguistic studies.

For instance, Fumi Karahashi's dissertation "Sumerian Compound Verbs with Body-Part Terms" is essentially a catalog of these types of verbs, the texts and contexts in which they occur and the semantic range of these verbs . . . not at all a stimulating topic. However, it went a long way in helping us understand compound verbs and how their elements contribute to the semantics of the verb. I think every work since references her work. Since then, her work is highly linguistic in nature . . .

So . . . I've got about two years to decide which route will be better . . .