I was surprised to discover that I never handed out the final project specifications—I actually thought I’d handed this out at the beginning of the course, but it appears that I didn’t.

So, here is a PDF outlining the different steps toward the final project (the project proposal, presentation, and paper). The proposal is due next week (March 27, in lieu of homework), and, as the specifications say:

Proposal. The proposal is basically just a sketch of the topic you would like to work on, and a list of candidate papers/books you are likely to read as a part of the project. You are not committed to using exactly the papers you put on the proposal, but you should do some initial research just to see what papers are out there. You should probably be able to put all of this on a single page, or maybe two. This is just a “safety net” designed to make sure that you haven’t picked what I would consider to be an impossible (or, more unlikely, a trivially easy) topic—and to ensure that you don’t wait until April 16th to start thinking about it.