What a long 18 months it has been. You made it this far as a graduate student during a pandemic. Congratulations! Now you are in your final year of funding, and you need to finish up that dissertation ...

There’s not much good to find in a destructive pandemic, but here’s one potentially positive outcome: Covid-19 may bring graduate schools to a long-needed reckoning with the dissertation requirement.

Since 2013, I’ve been teaching a two-week interdisciplinary dissertation workshop in early summer at the University of Cincinnati. Under normal conditions, the students and I meet for five hours each ...