“The writing of this thesis was a process that I could not explore with the positivistic detachment of the classical sociologist” 1 [1] From S3 in our corpus. Although we list the writers and titles of our corpus at the end of this paper, in the text we discuss the theses by discipline (H for History and S for Sociology) and a number, in order to focus on the texts themselves rather than on the individual writers. : Self and structure in New Humanities research theses

Abstract: To what extent have postmodernism and research modalities which fundamentally question the notion of the objective researcher impacted on the production of Ph.D. theses in the humanities and social sciences? This paper examines the visual and verbal representations of the writerly self through the title pages, tables of contents and introductory chapters of a corpus of 20 recent Ph.D. theses in History and Sociology from an Australian university. While affirming the dominance of the topic-based thesis macrostructure in the social sciences and humanities, it subjects the topic-based thesis category to greater scrutiny, presenting a case for the emergence of a New Humanities Ph.D., marked by its construction of a reflexive self, unable to write with the classic detachment of positivism. The paper briefly considers the implications for disciplinarity and postgraduate pedagogy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]